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Is everything I research and find on the Ancestry.com site information that someone has had to submit themselves? I am at a loss and wondering if the information I can use has just been luck? Can someone please answer? Thanks so much.
Is everything I research and find on the Ancestry.com site information that someone has had to submit themselves? I am at a loss and wondering if the information I can use has just been luck? Can someone please answer? Thanks so much.
Bobbi244
The majority of the information comes from public records.
You need to make a distinction between 2 major categories of info Ancestry provides.
One is Ancestry's own collection of public records from Federal State and Local archives, etc , ie the Censuses, Birth, Marriage, and Death Certificates, etc. Mostly reliable except for things like transcription errors (for which users can add corrections)
The other is user-provided personal family trees. Usually good sources but subject to human error, family "stories", and faulty research. Best used as clues to confirm/rebut your own research.
As already stated, the bulk of the information comes from official records sources. However, the indexes for these records, as well as some of the actual information, has been transcribed by volunteers, who often make mistakes. If a record looks close but some of the info. seems off, click on the record anyway to see if a copy of the original document has been uploaded. Just last night I saw a census transcript that showed a couple having a son who was listed as OLDER than the parents. A review of the original uploaded document showed that the son's age was listed as 5/12, meaning he was 5 months old. The transcriber listed him as age 51 on the index.
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