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.
You just have to keep giving them more and more private information about yourself and your unwitting family, then something magic happens.
And money by the looks.
And then cops use the data to track down DNA evidence in 40 year old cases
Well perhaps you should have refrained from killing those prostitutes 40 years ago‽
its just another way they collect data and track people.
Definitely US-centric. You have to pay extra to get records from some countries. Works very well for people in the US
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.
I've been paying $25 a month to run into relatives that all have their trees set to PRIVATE.
They're my cousins / second-cousins, and I'm not sure who their parents are or how they fit into my tree.
The site lets you look at US Census data... from the 1950s or some shit. So I can piece together family information upwards half a dozen ways to my grandparents and their parents and so on, but I can't seem to get any info from the system for anyone born after the 1950s.
I keep paying because I'm trying to solve a spooky family mystery.
That spooky family mystery is exactly why their family trees are all set to private.
story time! :D
Their grandpa married a ghost. They're 1/4 ghost.
Scooby Doo & The Gang in: WHO KILLED MEEMAW?!
I was a spooky family mystery. There are records out there, particularly for the US, but you have think laterally and use resources outside their walled garden. US census records are only released after (IIRC) 70 years, so getting the 1950 census was a pretty big development. Beyond that, there are obituaries, phone books, newspapers, yearbooks, and others. I can even say from experience that the creepy "Radaris" style sites are usually leveraging some kernels of valid information in the free teaser data they show.
I thought if I put my name and my parents and grandparents in, it would help me build a tree. Then it was so who are your great grandparents? Bitch that's why I'm here!?
Yeah exactly. I would have thought by the time I gave it a parents name or two that would be enough, but no.
How did you do your username like that? Is it just emojis?
Step 1: have an unrequited desire to be the center of attention
Step 2: emoji
Step 3: Don't fucking care because I use an app that blocks that shit.
Check out Voyager if it bugs you so much.
It doesn't bug me that much, I was making a joke. It's like the Internet version of naming your daughter Genefyr
I do wish we had an IRL app to force correct spellings of common names on birth certificates.
Yet another thing we can learn from Sweden.
It's a fancy text generator off Google. I'm not certain it is emojis, then you can change your display name on he website.
Most of these services are US-centric because a lot of the necessary records to provide the information isn’t public in many countries outside of the US.
Birth records, death records, marriage records, divorce records, voting records, criminal records, etc. is considered public information in much of the US. Even address information can be found publicly and immigration records become available to the public after a certain time.
In a lot of countries, especially in many European countries, these are hard to access for people that aren’t the subject of these records, if accessible at all.
For example while court records are public in much of Europe, often times the names of private persons are censored because it’s not deemed necessary to know who the parties are to be able to check if the courts make fair decisions.
This automatically excludes criminal and divorce information from disseminating into the public.
Some countries will make some records public once the subject of those records have passed for X amount of years, but that’s still pretty rare.
As such services like these have limited use outside the United States.
I built my family tree and thought - oh neat, even more ancestors to disappoint.
I use familysearch.org. It’s free! I’m not sure what country you’re in, but I’ve found a lot of info on European, Italian, and some African ancestors through there.
“It’s free!” Is alarming and inappropriately cheerful.
These sites are sociopathic data harvesters, and if your relatives have any sense they’ll give you shit for exposing them to it as well. If it’s free, it’s probably even worse.
.
Bless your little heart you’re confused about how these services work.
It looks like this is sponsored by the Mormon Church. They haven’t spammed you have they?
They own all of them. They have a large stake in Ancestry too. Also, the Mormon church has investment funds that own a ton of things. It was a big deal recently because they lied to the SEC to hide the size of it from their members.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensign_Peak_Advisors
Would you give 10% of your income to someone who has $124 billion already?
Beyond this, they will use the data in their fucked up rituals to “Baptize the dead”. They will take your ancestors names, and retroactively baptize them into their church without consent from the deceased or family.
I was raised LDS, though I had the good fortune to spot the BS as a teenager and haven't set foot in a church in almost 20 years. I did however, participate in the baptisms for the dead when I was like 16. The theology is bafflingly stupid and cheerfully inconsiderate (a lot like Mormons, LOL, amiright? I'll be here all week!).
At least when I did it, the notion is that everyone who died without a chance to honestly consider Mormon teachings is in a kind of low-intensity purgatory rather than straight-up Hell. In this place, they will still be pestered by missionaries, but for some reason it's critical that_ someone's_ body be physically baptized in their name. Mormons are taught that they should chug along collecting their relatives names so a random teenager in Boise who lied about whether they jerk off can get dunked in an industrial bathtub perched on top of mediocre statues of oxen. This checks the appropriate box on the deceased's spiritual resume, so if they accept the teachings in the afterlife, the pre-reqs to be fully Mormonized will have been met. The current rules are only to do [edit: submit] names of your actual relatives, but yeah... Familysearch says we're all related to "Thor Odinson" and Noah.
Of course, if it turned out the Mormons were right, there are some weird knock-on effects. First, why would Earthly missionary efforts be desirable at all? You're just giving people the chance to potentially doom themselves while they are still subject to bad influences. Second, why is there no accommodation for people whose names are not recorded? Fuck them, right? Third, what on God's green Kolob is the point of pretending there is a "choice." I have likely fucked myself, being a dirty quitter (My wife once overheard her parents' Mormon neighbors describe me as an "apostate"), but if it turns out the Mormons are right, I am gonna feel pretty fuckin' dumb, and similarly, barring some "The Good Place" shenanigans, literally 100% of the people who are given the chance to accept the "Gospel" after they're already dead will accept.
Personally, I think the LDS emphasis on genealogy was mostly a way to collect intel to assert control, inflate membership in the early days, create a shared sense of history and connection in Utah where literally none of the members had deep family roots and so many had abandoned their own families for this weird culty church. Then, finally, it gives nosy grandmas a way to do God's work while pursuing their hobbies. Like so many things in religion generally and Mormonism specifically, it kind of got out of hand.
Huh, that wasn’t the case the one time I was forced by my parents to do it. I didn’t have any names so they just assigned me random names. But I wouldn’t know how it is now.
Lol I literally had the same exact thought when all of this was explained to me. It makes no sense. But that’s par for the course for the entire religion sooooo……
What I meant was they are only supposed to put their own relatives into the system. By the time you get to the assembly line, I agree it's still 99% going to be randos.
Oh, gotcha. That makes a lot more sense.
That’s good to know. I knew there had to be some sort of catch, but I wasn’t expecting that
Latter-day Saints believe that the deceased may choose to accept or reject baptisms for the dead. There is no "forcing dead people to join the church" going on.
"Dear Angel of the Lord, I am afraid that having died and been sent to spirit prison to be ministered to by the souls of righteous Nephites, I am still not convinced. I am sure that Catholic heaven is just on the other side of those pearly gates, and I formally request a transfer."
Do you not understand how patently absurd this is for a faith that makes claims of exclusive truth? It's PR nonsense so that most outside people will shake their heads and back off, and members won't feel like they're doing something disrespectful and disturbing.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Your paragraph of dialog doesn't make any sense to me.
I'm saying that the church claims to be the one true church with unique access to the entirety of the Gospel. I am further saying that Baptism for the Dead is described as something that the deceased person can choose to accept or reject.
I am then saying that the "choice" to accept truths presented to you after you have died and find you now exist on a supernatural plane in which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was "correct" is no meaningful choice whatsoever. Presenting it as such is to obfuscate the fact that the Church will continue to heed its own counsel as to what is "a respectful, reverent process that is motivated purely by love," and that the non-believers need to STFU so the Mormons can get on with the extremely important business of saving souls, but only those whose names were written down somewhere, because apparently the Lord is a stickler for paperwork.
What they believe is irrelevant. It’s disrespectful to the beliefs of the deceased and their loved ones. Do you realize how insulting this would be to a Jewish person? It’s spitting in the face of their own beliefs.
Those who understand the spirit in which vicarious baptism are performed by Latter-day Saints understand that it is a respectful, reverent process that is motivated purely by love. It is not spitting in the face of anyone's beliefs.
Wow. my app cut off this comment so editing:
Nope! They send occasional emails when they find new records or a past relative’s birthday, but I have not received any spammy ones from the Mormons or asked to join their cult.
Good to know, thank you!
It’s a group effort so if nobody in your country uses it then it’s going to be a lot less helpful to you.
I don’t know how it gets started in an area because presumably everyone else you know would get the same experience as you when they sign in so how does it encourage people to start building the knowledge base up?
I know that it works in the UK. My wife has used it and found a lot of useful info but had to add her own info too.
Least you had a free trial so that's something
I'm on 23 and me and some of my long lost cousins from the south keep trying to hook up with me.
I mean, I guess that's a complement in a way at least.