Is Online Resource ancestry.com Worth Price?
Do Genealogists Need Internet Resources That Are Not Free?
Oct 8, 2008
Some things are tough to call, not always because of their innate value, but because of our very human differences from each other and the varying ways we use available information. Use of ancestry.com for online genealogical research is one of those instances.
Subscription rates are fairly high, but the real question is: how much would it be used, for what reasons, and does the researcher know enough about the resources it offers to make a good judgment.
The Rates
A basic subscription weighs in at over $100.00 for a year. There are add-ons--such as researching British records--that increase the ante. If a person is clear about research needs, they are more apt to know what add-ons would be most helpful.
That said, genealogists can't forecast what many individual research needs will be. Example: In one month a researcher might have traced five immigrant ancestors back to a location in England. However, the researcher doesn’t usually know that before the need for additional data arises. A new line might, within a few weeks, lead to a few more families or to dozens of new ancestors.
A rule of thumb: Before incurring the cost of an add-on to the basic subscription, try to--over a period of time--group research needs. Wait until a dozen or more new English ancestral names and locations pop up before signing up for the British records add-on.
Cautionary Advice
Most ancestry.com members go straight to the family trees to look for their ancestors in someone else's results. There are thousands of family trees on ancestry.com. Unfortunately, more than half of them have faulty information because it has been copied from someone else's erroneous work.
One reason for this unfortunate situation is that the earliest online genealogies were done by people with little research experience, many of them computer geeks who felt challenged by how to list large groups of people in sortable data bases.
These family trees often give valuable clues, but that's exactly what they are--only clues. Each family researcher's job is to prove or disprove, with documented sources, those clues which seem to fit their own ancestors.
Census Records
Seasoned researchers find that the ancestry.com basic rate is worth it for the census records alone. There is easy access to all U. S. census records between 1790 and 1930.
In addition, there is access to many military records, historical records, biographical data and some birth, marriage and death records.
It often boils down to how much time is spent doing online research and what other resources have been exhausted. There is a considerable quantity of free online genealogical data available, the largest free source being through rootsweb.
If the researcher has exhausted rootsweb.com--which is almost impossible--and spends more than 1,000 hours a year searching on the computer for ancestors, then that genealogist is a good candidate for an ancestry.com subscription.
The trend is toward larger genealogical data bases online. Eventually all the larger ones will probably charge a subscription rate.
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