My ancestry.com experience in a nutshell
I don't know if I'm just doing something wrong but I built my family tree and the website seems to have barely any information about my family at all. I found out more just checking out our national archives then what I found on this website. It's maybe worth noting that I'm not in the US and it does appear to be somewhat US-centric.
The best it could find was a couple of enrollment records for voting and a single immigrant notification in an old newspaper. It didn't find these either by itself, I had to manually go though the search system to find it. The OCR didn't even get the spelling of the name correct.
I'm not sure what I expected but it was definitely better than this, especially for all the pay walls they throw up.
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Clearly, you aren't a super white American. My family tree got filled up easily up until the 1600s because I have a bunch of family members with nothing better to do than catalog our family tree. Apparently one half of my family came from Scotland in the 16th century so I can claim that I'm Scottish-American now.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Source: actual Scot
Username checks out.
I think its so funny hearing people are American (whatever country their grandpappy came from) 😂
We're just looking for something cooler than "I'm American."
It's because American doesn't tell you anything about where your ancestry is from. You could be from anywhere in the world and be American. Scottish is a pretty specific things, as is just about any other nationality.
I still only say I'm American even though my family is largely from Scotland. WV Appalachian (I think Appalachian in general) has a large percentage of Scottish ancestry, and it also shares the same mountain range interestingly enough.