New ways of finding elusive ancestors

Comments (11)

• As a former member, I think many of us have a right to be frustrated with Ancestry.com. Their membership fees are astronomical, and trying to cancel the service takes a phone battle with a determined sales person telling you why you should stay – anything to keep you from canceling. IMHO one should be able to cancel without fifteen minute song and dance with Ancestry.com.
  Yes, Ancestry.com is available at my local FHC, but the one computer is still on dial-up, and with 30-minute time allotments, you rarely are able to download more than one document per visit.
  Face it, we use Ancestry.com and other online resources because it can faster and we don’t have to go through layers of people to get to the data. Why can’t cancellation be as easy as subscribing?

• I find an annual subscription to Ancestry.com of great value. I search totally on line. Lots has been written about ancestry.com, most derogatory. I think people have a skewed view of the site. It’s great! Everythings there and one can easily jump about checking & re-checking facts. The SSDeath index is not a complete story. The obits in newspapers can be. Save money & time and have a safe storage place for all treasured pics, documents and research. The site is very good and growing daily. I also had to get over initial bias. I’d rather spend money here than anywhere else.

• reply to Kathy, you can go to the mormon church site and get lots of info on UK. My parents from Scotland and it has been a bear, but found a lot in their data base. Other than that, I hired a reasearch in Edinbough to confirm data and search.and have a cousin in Aberdeen who did some footwork to.

• Adverts like this would be much more useful if they said where the records come from – all my ancestors are from UK, and it seems unless I subscribe I can’t see if there is likely to be anything useful. Can anybody tell me if all the records are US?

• I wonder how this will help find records in the Sessions Chuch in Aryshire. They were not made public, this leaves me stuck in 1773. I would appreciate any suggestions.

• Ancestry.com has shown itself to be rather useless for Eastern Europe, Baltics, Belarus research in my experience. I’m not interested in Germany and the US. Frist generation American – I need the info from overseas. So far, best source is still the LDS Church and my own leg work.

• hi well im ancestry.com customer and I tryed to find
  my anccester in ireland with little known can this program help me be truthful now

• Comments
  With all recent activity getting documents digitized, it’s difficult to tell which company has the better collection. For instance, a subscription to Ancesty.com includes historical newspapers, obits, books, and, the SSDI is FREE! So now comes along GenealogyBank.com, which has historical newspapers, obits, historical books, and, the SSDI is NOT free. Genealogy.com doesn’t have the newspapers, but it has various other items, some that you can’t get anywhere else, some that you can. NewpsperArchive.com and NewsBank/Obitsarchive.com also have historical newspapers and obits, but no SSDI. And, of course, let’s not leave out Legacy.com, which has lots of obits, some free and some you have to pay for, and, the SSDI is free. Then, there’s footnote.com which is digitizing all kinds of historical documents.
  At $70.00 and more for an annual subscription, a person could go broke subscribing to all these, not to mention how much duplication there is! I think it’s great that those of us who don’t have access to an FHL or time to travel can get online and do research, but heavens, IMHO, the market is getting saturated and the vendors are getting greedy. I now have more online options than ever, but I STILL don’t have any more information on my grandfather than I did before all these “new” online vendors came to town.
  How true this is,they are getting more hungry then ever to make more money.

• I find articles such as this to be on the other side of lame. Come on. Do not tell us that the introductory price is “just $9.95 for the first month.”
  Share with us the real price. Why *must* we have to do the research as to the actual terms?

• GenealogyBank is available for free from my local public library, which I can access online from the privacy of my own home. Researchers should check to see what their local public library is offering these days. I didn’t even notice when they started. They also offer NewsBank, so I’m pretty much covered for obituaries!

• With all recent activity getting documents digitized, it’s difficult to tell which company has the better collection. For instance, a subscription to Ancesty.com includes historical newspapers, obits, books, and, the SSDI is FREE! So now comes along GenealogyBank.com, which has historical newspapers, obits, historical books, and, the SSDI is NOT free. Genealogy.com doesn’t have the newspapers, but it has various other items, some that you can’t get anywhere else, some that you can. NewpsperArchive.com and NewsBank/Obitsarchive.com also have historical newspapers and obits, but no SSDI. And, of course, let’s not leave out Legacy.com, which has lots of obits, some free and some you have to pay for, and, the SSDI is free. Then, there’s footnote.com which is digitizing all kinds of historical documents.
  At $70.00 and more for an annual subscription, a person could go broke subscribing to all these, not to mention how much duplication there is! I think it’s great that those of us who don’t have access to an FHL or time to travel can get online and do research, but heavens, IMHO, the market is getting saturated and the vendors are getting greedy. I now have more online options than ever, but I STILL don’t have any more information on my grandfather than I did before all these “new” online vendors came to town.