An oldie's lament

[piedstilt]

It has been some time since I have been involved in genealogical research and ages since I have been back to Rootschat, though I loved it as a reasonably early member. Family, financial and earthquake crises have kept me off line.

Recently I received a commission to write a family history and the people concerned kindly funded a new subscription to Ancestry (at great expense). What a disappointment! I used to be able to put in a name and fossick among the various options in my own way. Now I seem to get nothing but pre-digested suggestions (the same with the newish familysearch). It all seems like genealogy for dummies.

No doubt there are new things to be discovered, but I am currently feeling grumpy enough to vent my spleen.

Sorry!

[Erato]

I no longer have Ancestry but, when I did, I used it just to search for information or, as you say, fossick around.  I never had any problem with unwanted suggestions because I didn't put my tree online so the program never had any branches to attach unwanted leaves to.

[Annie65115]

Just ignore the hints and search diligently as you would anyway. There is so much more info now online that you might be pleasantly surprised 

[ThrelfallYorky]

I too ignore the hints - although it can be entertaining to see how far away from what I think I know, they can be. Sometimes they have been right, when i look into it and check out what I have, more often they are wrong - but you don't need to take the slightest notice of them, and as others say, there's so much online, that with images of the entries, you can save yourself some shoeleather and petrol costs!

[3sillydogs]

Yes just ignore the hints, there is a wealth of information on there.  The hints can be entertaining when I see who they think might be related, or I get hints from my own tree ( I keep a basic one on Ancestry) from the site where I keep the main one

[mogwood]

Agreed, there is a wealth of info there, but sometimes it can be a heck of a job to access it.

I find that it will give you a set of results, and no matter how much or how often you amend the search terms to find who you want, it will often immediately still give you exactly the same result you got the first time - clearly has not re-searched for the answers.   Very annoying !

I think it's something to do with this "new improved" version   

[Beeonthebay]

If I know the area where I want to search I was advised on another forum to go to the card catalogue and type in the town of interest, in my case usually Liverpool then that narrows it down so I don't get 1,000,000 hits, nothing more annoying than this, then when you put tick exact Christian name or whatever it comes back with zero results. 

My theory is "they" are trying to keep you on their subscribed site for as long as possible so instead of you going on there and finding your record ASAP you spend hours (months) scrolling through and dismissing the flotsam and jetsam and wasting time.

Some of the hints have been pretty good I must say, but some you sit there and say "WHAT??!!!!" how the hell did it come up with this for a match!!    And consequently lots of trees have accepted these hints as FACTS and have a right muddle of names and relationships, children born before the parents, mixed up step families, etc.  The same with the LDS records, these are just a hint because there is not enough information on the "select" records ie indexes to take you back further without looking at a parish register at a record office or buying a certificate.

You see lots of trees on there where the person hasn't signed back on for a year probably because they got in such a muddle and believed the Ancestry hype!!

[3sillydogs]

My pet peeve with most of these sites not only Ancestry is that when you limit the search to a specific region, you get results that are no where near the area you were searching for, sometimes not even in the same country.

But they do save us legwork and allow us to view documents that we may not have been able to see because they are in another country's archives.

[clairec666]

To avoid the "flotsam and jetsam", I only ever search one record set at a time - I keep a little index of relevant record sets and add to it whenever I hear of something new being released. And lo - no more "Essex, Massachusetts" popping up when I don't want it! I'll use "search all records" sometimes if I'm researching a new branch. Ancestry can be so frustrating compared to FreeREG/FreeCEN/FreeBMD where you can search for exactly what you want with no distractions!