Ancestry.com Review

A few years ago, I realised that, once my parents are gone, there really won't be anyone aorund to tell me about my family's past. Luckily, my grandmother was a great story-teller, family historian, and pack rat. She kept photos, birth certificates, postcards, letters - you name it. And she talked a lot about her childhood, her parents, her siblings and the small Caribbean town where she grew up. So, in 2001, when I started doing some web research in an effort to put together a family tree, I at least had a few things to start with: place names, names of people, ideas about birth dates. Back then, Ancestry.com was very limited: there were no links to actual historical records and an emphasis was placed on Anglo family histories. Their strength was in their networking tools. One could join or start a thread about a family name, and post messages/queries, in the hopes of finding other researchers looking for the same family history or family name. I didn't have a lot of hope, but I gave it a try and, surprisingly enough, I eventually made contact with two distant cousins - one in upstate NY and another in Southern California. One of them had even known my grandparents when she was a child in Puerto Rico, and remembered some of my uncles. Another was the daughter of a much older relative a i remembered very well. In fact, I'd inherited some beautiful black and white photographs of him as a child, when my grandmother died - there was no one else to pass them on to, and I'd kept them safely in an album, ever since. When I found his daughter, I also found that she didn't have a single photo of her father, so it really made me happy to be able to pack up those photos and send them to their "proper" home. She was thrilled to have this little piece of history and I felt as if I'd managed to tie up a loose end.

As for putting together a family tree, though, I wasn't able to get very far.  Puerto Rico is the oldest colony in the world and having spent all of recorded history as a colony, their written records are less than perfect. So, I eventually stopped going to Ancestry.com

During the past week, my interest has revived, and I've found some pretty big changes at this site. First off, it's now a pay-only site. And it's not cheap! I signed up for a 14 day free trial, and am making great use of this free two weeks. Another change is that they now have access to tons of old census records and other historical documents, all on microfilm. As a member, I can look at the actual census entry of my great grandfather's household in 1910. I can even print it up. Pretty cool!

Perhaps most interesting is some of the sloppy record-taking. As far as I can see, census takers in 1910 would ask questions and write down answers. They didn't pay all that much attention to spelling, and clear handwriting wasn't a requirement for the job. I had some trouble finding some of the Torres branch of my family because the census taker had decided the hea dof household was named Jose Tones. Interestingly enough, the census taker noted every other member of the household as having Torres as a surname. Go figure. Ancestry.com allows users to note these mistakes on their database, so that future users can find records more easily. 

I've also noticed that census takers seemed to be pretty flippant when listing people's race/ethniciy. My great-grandfather, who was a black man, is listed by different census takers as: "mulatto", "colored" and even "white."

At the end of the day, Ancestry.com's new features have enabled me to track back several generations, find out the names of several ancestors who'd always been elusive, and even discover some family surnames I'd known nothing about.

I'm pleased with the site, but not crazy about the pricing structure, and I'm pretty sure I'll print up my progress and quit before I have to start paying.

If you're interested in geneology, and would get a kick out of looking at your family's census records or birth and death records or records of military service before 1940, giving the free trial thing a try is well worth it.