answers1: It varies. Ancestry.com has two main sections, records and
"Public Member Trees". The records are pretty accurate; 95% or better.
The PMTs are notoriously bad. <br>
<br>
Familysearch.org, the Mormons, is about the same; the records are
pretty accurate, the family trees (AF, PRF, etc) are full of errors.
<br>
<br>
I'll give you two examples of the records. Ask yourself where your
spouse's parents were born. (If you are single, your best friend,
boyfriend, girlfriend.) Now pretend you are in 1880, the census
enumerator is at the door, you are the wife, your husband is plowing
the back 40, so you take your best guess. (One of the questions on the
census, 1880 - 1930, was birthplace each person's father and mother.)
Or, ask yourself if you know your grandmothers' maiden names. <br>
<br>
Eaxmple 2, great grandma gets really friendly with the hired man in
the Winter of '85, but the child looks enough like her husband no one
suspects, and she never tells. Little Ralph goes through life thinking
her husband is his father. <br>
<br>
In both cases, the information gets written down by a clerk, then
transcribed by someone (Ancestry hires people in India, Familysearch
uses volunteers.) So, in the case of asking the wife about her
husband's parents' birthplaces, the data has come from Parents >
Husband > Wife > Enumerator > Transcriber. Each of those persons are
human and subject to error. <br>
<br>
I see bad transcriptions all the time. I saw a family named "Freeman"
transcribed in 1860 as "Fruman" because the enumerator's e's were very
skinny. Clerks don't always spell properly, either. <br>
<br>
In the second case, only a DNA test on his descendants would reveal
the truth; you might have 5 census entries, birth, marriage and death
certificates, an entry in the "Biographical and Pictoral History of
Madison County" and an obituary, and they would all be wrong about the
father. <br>
<br>
After a while you get a feel for it. It is rare to have the same birth
year on every record for a given person, for instance, but the birth
month and day are usually consistent. <br>
<br>
There are over 400,000 free web sites devoted to genealogy in English.
They are all subject to mistakes.
answers2: anything on a computer is only as good as the information
plugged into it. have heard both sides of like and dislike on most
sites. some can get pricey.
answers3: With any website, you must distinguish between their
subscriber submitted family trees and the records they have. I view
any website that only has family trees and no actual records as a
trash website. Even when you see the absolute same information on the
same people from many different subscribers that doesn't mean it is
accurate as too many people copy without verifying with actual
records.
answers4: If they are scanned primary documents accurate, secondary
scanned document as accurate as it would be in seeing the real
document |( some of the information may not be accurate...... typed
info, transcriptions, indexes all a clue only so you can look for the
real record, family trees are "lets pretend" or " collections of
unrelated names" unless of course each person on the tree has their
own lifetime of real records attached a sources of the
information......... as the majority of websites have very few primary
scanned documents, websites are not the way to research and prove your
ancestry
answers5: Waste of money
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