Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
FamilySearch and Ancestry.com has partnered since 2014 on various records. Additionally as another has mentioned FamilySearch is operated by the LDS (The Mormon Church). Ancestry.com is privately operated but founded in Utah as well. All stemmed from the Mormons focus on genealogy, much of which stems from what another poster also shared in their baptisms for the dead. Basically their belief that having a baptism (basically a proxy baptism with living people standing in) for a dead person they give them the opportunity and option to be saved. I won't comment on the religious nature of this, I was born and raised a Southern Baptist but am an atheist and to be honest most religious rituals seem pretty bizarre to me now.
I use both and many people use both. FamilySearch has an excellent amount of records for free, which is great. With that said there's a reason Ancestry is paid for, they use that money to include many (*many*) more records, they spend more time and effort digitizing them, transcribing them, indexing them for search, etc. Even things like the free census records will have more info transcribed on Ancestry.com often. Just a reality of being a successful for profit company with a lot of money behind it and reinvesting in it to remain relevant. Likewise Ancestry is far easier to use for most things, for more options, better tree building, etc.
With that said there's a completely separate topic of trees on the sites. Ancestry is a victim of making their trees so easy to build and share, genealogy has always been full of a *lot* of bad info. Just read genealogy books from the late 1800s and early 1900s. There's a couple gems but so many are full of horrible genealogy, applying the same bad genealogy we see today just with the ways to do it then. It's no surprise when it's made amazingly easy to find records (that aren't really relevant for your ancestor) and amazingly easy to build and share trees that most of them are pretty bad. Any other site that makes it just as easy will suffer just as much.
So as a general rule don't trust other trees you see *anywhere* without taking a look at their sources and ensuring the logic matches up. Don't let that cloud the amazing records you get on Ancestry.com, it really is worth the money if you fully utilize it. They add new records, extend indexes to existing ones, and various other efforts to expand datasets all the time. With that said you can't really do genealogy seriously without relying on many sources.
One of the best aspects of FamilySearch is actually not their digital records but they have an online index of physical books and microfilms among the LDS Family Libraries that are around the US. You can actually pay to basically rent a microfilm and loan it to your local location and go see it in person. I have yet to do it but I've queued up a list of ones I plan to do. A lot of these books really get expensive if you buy each and every one yourself just for a few lines on a page.
Okay, I'm Mormon, and would be happy to tell you how this works. I'm not going to go into the theological reasons for the practice of baptisms for the dead, as I believe it to be inappropriate for this particular forum. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been firmly instructed that they should perform posthumous baptisms only for their own ancestors. The vast, vast majority of Mormons respect this ruling and act accordingly. Occasionally, there are those who do not. Repeated offenses are dealt with and members who refuse to obey the rules may lose their privileges. Lastly, you should know that no posthumous baptism is capable of turning anyone into a Mormon against his or her wishes (i.e. "mormonized"). I hope that clarifies the situation for those who may find it disturbing.
Thanks for clarifying... personally I don't have any fears of Mormons baptizing my ancestors (as an atheist it does no harm or good in my opinion).
With that said I'll add that people nowadays only baptizing the dead of their own ancestors is only of limited difference considering the size of the Mormon population and how widespread it has become. Basically there's a chance most Americans share many ancestors with Mormons. So beyond your last 3 generations or so there's a somewhat reasonable chance you have a Mormon cousin that shares that ancestry. So by expanding a tree that they can get access to that might indeed result in baptisms of the dead via Mormon cousins. Most of that being more recent Mormon growth in the last few decades and expanding outside of older specific Mormon areas (like Utah), since before that most Mormon ancestry seemed to be pretty narrow to recent European immigrants and the older Northeast Mormon families.
Again I don't care myself, not a big deal, and I'm glad you clarified so people can not spread any misinformation.
Personally, as far as records go, I have found very little on Ancestry that was not available either on FamilySearch or via microfilm / fiche records that I ordered in at the local Mormon church.
I have found enough to make Ancestry worth the money, for me. Even when collections are available both at Ancestry and on microfilm, I'm partly paying for the convenience of not having to order film, wait for it to arrive, go to my FHC during their opening hours, and get all my research done not only during their opening hours, but also before the film gets returned.
That said, microfilm/fiche is no longer available, though they are working on digitizing everything, much of it is currently only accessible from a computer at a FHC. I don't mind going my local FHC, but I'd rather the convenience of researching from home.
And like I say, Ancestry does have a LOT of records FS does not. Ancestry have over 20 billion records - I don't know the exact records count from FS, but I know they have 2.4 million microfilms. If I recall correctly, each film holds anywhere from about 500 records to 1000. Even if we assume they all hold 1000, that's only 2.4 billion records, not even remotely close to the 20 billion Ancestry have. To even break even with Ancestry, each film roll would need to hold about 8,000 records. The amount of fiche and books and other types of sources they hold at FS only add up to about 1 million so that doesn't make a huge difference either.
Quote:
Regarding the family histories that were uploaded by Ancestry users - about 90% are so riddled with mistakes they are rendered useless!
The same is true for any tree hosting site, and Ancestry aren't responsible for what their users do with their trees anyway. In any case, no good genealogist should be using trees as a source, unless the tree is well documented, in which case you should be using the same documents they did, not just copying from their tree. So it really shouldn't matter what other people are doing with their trees - the records should be your sources, and that's the primary value of Ancestry's site: the records.
Quote:
Personally, I consider Ancestry to be a huge rip-off. I have logged in at my local library (for free) to do some searching for people and events I did not have from traditional sources, but had very little success. The only value I would see is if you were just starting out and had more money than time. Even then, I would exhaust FamilySearch site first.
Everything is, of course, dependent on each individual's research - what sources the individual in particular needs. Just as an example, Ancestry.com is the ONLY online resource for Pennsylvania Vital Records issued from the State Department of health. Not available on FS at all, not even an index. Of course, if you have no research in Pennsylvania, then you likely wouldn't know or care about this. But it's not just the odd collection here and there - the stats prove just how much more Ancestry offers than FS (again, over 20 billion versus about 2-4 billion). They are both valuable resources though, and there's no reason one has to choose one over the other - the best genealogists use ALL available resources they can. If one can't afford Ancestry, I would recommend using it for free at your local library or Family History Center. They are constantly adding new collections too - so even if you've checked it at your local library in the past, I would recommend checking it again at least once a year. Also, don't just search your ancestor's names in the search engine. Use the card catalog to find collections Ancestry have that FS don't, collections you might need. Then search those individual collections. Getting the most out of Ancestry means digging a little deeper sometimes.
One of the best aspects of FamilySearch is actually not their digital records but they have an online index of physical books and microfilms among the LDS Family Libraries that are around the US. You can actually pay to basically rent a microfilm and loan it to your local location and go see it in person. I have yet to do it but I've queued up a list of ones I plan to do. A lot of these books really get expensive if you buy each and every one yourself just for a few lines on a page.
Microfilm/fiche loaning is no longer available - it was discontinued recently. They are in the process of digitizing everything instead.
Many of the books they have are already available online from Google Books, archive.org, gengophers.com, etc.
Ancestry has more documents & I understand how to manipulate the search engines. But familysearch is a wonderful place to begin your research due to the free aspect.
As far as research of others, I do not trust it--ever.
There are many free sources listed on this forum. The oldest & most helpful might be genweb.
If you don't mind, will you elaborate a bit on the bolded part above? It seems to be an art to figuring out what search parameters to use on Family Search and Ancestry .
That's too bad that you can no longer order in micro film / fiche. I was not aware of that as I haven't needed to for several years. What I have found on FamilySearch is some of the information has been transcribed wrong. (Speaking mostly of old German Churchbook records). I have gone back to photocopies I have made from the microfilms to confirm that I had it right and sure enough, they got it wrong when they put it up on the website. That is one of the downsides of this technology - it might be more convenient, but it is definitely not as accurate! There are humans involved in transcribing this info - so there are bound to be mistakes. I would assume Ancestry is the same, but I have not spent enough time on there to notice.
Microfilm/fiche loaning is no longer available - it was discontinued recently. They are in the process of digitizing everything instead.
Many of the books they have are already available online from Google Books, archive.org, gengophers.com, etc.
Thanks for sharing, well bad news good news I guess. Since I've waited as long as I have hopefully I can just wait longer to get some of those book digitally. Whenever looking I always look at all those sites for a digital version, though there's still a decent amount of books that are yet digitized unfortunately.
That's too bad that you can no longer order in micro film / fiche. I was not aware of that as I haven't needed to for several years. What I have found on FamilySearch is some of the information has been transcribed wrong. (Speaking mostly of old German Churchbook records). I have gone back to photocopies I have made from the microfilms to confirm that I had it right and sure enough, they got it wrong when they put it up on the website. That is one of the downsides of this technology - it might be more convenient, but it is definitely not as accurate! There are humans involved in transcribing this info - so there are bound to be mistakes. I would assume Ancestry is the same, but I have not spent enough time on there to notice.
Yes, transcription errors are definitely just a part of genealogy. If you've ever done some indexing, you'll know how difficult it can be, and it becomes much easier to forgive transcription errors. It's easy to correctly transcribe something when you know what you're looking for - you already know the person's name, location, etc that you're looking for. The indexer doesn't. That's one of the things I like about Ancestry - they provide users with the ability to add alternate transcriptions to an index so it helps others find the right records. FamilySearch doesn't offer that.
Yes, transcription errors are definitely just a part of genealogy. If you've ever done some indexing, you'll know how difficult it can be, and it becomes much easier to forgive transcription errors. It's easy to correctly transcribe something when you know what you're looking for - you already know the person's name, location, etc that you're looking for. The indexer doesn't. That's one of the things I like about Ancestry - they provide users with the ability to add alternate transcriptions to an index so it helps others find the right records. FamilySearch doesn't offer that.
And its not just transcription errors.
I have added probably 50+ corrections to Ancestry listings due to census taker and deth cert informant phonetic misspellings, etc
My own mother's name is wrong in the 1940 Census
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
.
