Q&A: What is the best Genealogy subscription site?
Question by JoLynn11: What is the best Genealogy subscription site?
I want to subscribe to a Genealogy site. Which ones are worth the cost?
Best answer:
Answer by Jason H
Rootsweb is good.
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/
And it’s free to join.
Ancestry.com seems to get a bit of traffic through it but it’s a pay site.
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4 Comments
I believe the best due to the total amount of original source records online is Ancestry.Com.
Most all have family trees including Ancestry.Com, but you should be cautious about them. They are mostly not documented or poorly documented. You will see different info on the same people from different subscribers. Then you will see the exact same info on the same people from different subscribers but that is no guarantee at all it is correct. A lot of people copy without verifying. The information can be useful as clues as to where to get the documentation.
You can make up an entirely fictitious family tree and it will be accepted by any genealogy website. Actually, if you disagree with information on one of your family members in another subscriber’s tree, they will tell you it is between you and the other subscriber.
Ancestry.Com has all the U.S. censuses through 1930. The 1940 and later are not available to the public yet. They have land, military,immigration and other records. They have indexes to vital records(birth,marriage and death) of many U.S. states. Not all records are online but the ones they have will save you travel money going to courthouses, state libraries etc all over the country.
They have transcribed the records but you can view the original images. There are errors in their transcriptions, particularly censuses, but when you view the original image you can have pity on the transcriber.
If you decide to set your tree up on their website, they will give you “hints” on people that are in other family trees. Just don’t automatically copy what another has. Also they will give you hints on records they have on some of your people which you can use as documentation in your tree but make sure it is the same person.
In the past often time there were several cousins with the same name, born about the same time, living pretty much in the same locality.
Genealogy.Com use to encourage people to merge other family trees into theirs. Don’t know if they still do it but that is a very poor idea.
People who do that or copy what someone else has is more interested in having a lot of names in their tree and not a good documented, verifiable family tree.
Ancesty.com is the best genealogy site out there. It has the most source records and alot of them have actual images of the original documents so you can look and verify if the information in the searches were transcribed wrong. Depending on where your ancestors are from would determine which subscription you need to purchase. I only have the US subscription because until you get really far back all my ancestors live in the US. Once I get to a point where I am searching for information overseas I will purchase the World version. The US version has everything from birth, marriage, death records to military and census records. It has definitely been the most helpful to me and i have tried several other sites. As a back up when I’m running short on money I use http://www.mytrees.com because I can do extraction projects and earn search time without having to pay for it but is not near as good as ancestry.com. I have also tried genealogy.com and it is ok but not near as good as ancestry.com and it is only marginally cheaper well worth the extra cost to get the better subscription with ancestry.com.
Ancestry.com still has a slight edge – but World Vital Records is coming up fast and I very often find things on it that Ancestry has missed.
The other dark horse is the LDS site – this of course is free – but if you use the drop down menu on the search tab, you can go to their pilot site which has an amazing number of resources available for searching with more being added each day.
Also LDS familyhistory centers have memberships in World Vital Records and Heritage quest if you visit them.
Heritage Quest has the US Censuses and WVR has the UK censuses(with much better transcriptions than Ancestry)
Here is a couple of good free sites:
http://www.nosorigines.qc.ca
This site is bilingual.
http://www.genealogiequebec.info
This is a French site and there are a lot of sources.
I have a few more, but they are all in French.
Leirum