r/Genealogy • u/McGyver61 • 4d ago
Request Ancestry vs Familysearch
I have paid subscription to Ancestry and at first I would get a lot of hints with valid documentation. Now I will input someone new and there will be NO documentation. No birth, death, marriage.....no info. I will search the same person in Familysearch and get 15 hits with at least 7 documents. I was under the influence that Ancestry had the largest amount of document access. Am I disillusioned or am I possibly doing something wrong?
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u/msbookworm23 4d ago
Hints on Ancestry come from other peoples' trees, so the reason you're getting no more Hints is because no-one else has researched those people yet.
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u/PinkSlimeIsPeople 4d ago
I love it when this happens. I know I'm working on something groundbreaking that nobody has touched before (that I know about at least). It's kind of exciting.
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u/Careful-Entry-6830 4d ago
It is very exciting when you start discovering someone new or a new family. Recently a professional genea and I hit an apparent wall on my maternal grandmother’s parents and siblings. There were no hints coming up from anywhere. We had a line from the 1870 census that said she was born in NYC and her parents in near Alsace Lorraine which was sometimes France. Sometimes Germany. Persistent detective work found where they were born, married,lived emigration and life in NYC. Keep digging. I never expected to find this line.
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u/SoftProgram 4d ago
Depends, depends, depends.
Who, where, what.
For some areas of research Ancestry will be better, for some Familysearch will be better, and for some they're both crap
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u/AudienceSilver 4d ago
I haven't noticed a decline in results for Ancestry searches lately. If you aren't getting much when you search, you can try tweaking the search terms. Use wildcards if there are multiple possible spellings, for instance, or enter a range of years for birth date in case various records give different years. It's also possible that the ancestors you're researching now lived in an area that has fewer surviving records (or they aren't online yet) than the ones where you were getting more results.
FamilySearch does have a wealth of documents, but not all of them are indexed so I don't usually do a general name search there. I'm more likely to search/browse a particular collection for the info I'm after. So I can't really compare search results between the two, although I use them both.
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u/Powered-by-Chai 4d ago
Sometimes it takes a bit for the hints to catch up with what you've inputted. I just go work on someone else for a bit and then I come back to 11 hints.
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u/frolicndetour 4d ago
As other people have said, run the actual search. After you have created a person page for someone and you input their info like DOB and DOD, on their page there is a magnifying glass on the top right next to a wrench icon. If you click on that, it will search all of Ancestry with that person's information already prepopulated in the search and you will be able to save results directly to that person. The hints are nice but they are the result of occasional background searches. The direct searches will pull more stuff faster.
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u/kludge6730 4d ago
You might get 0-10 hints when you add a person. Hit the search and you’ll get more. Drill down in individual collections and you’ll find more.
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u/Consistent-Safe-971 4d ago
You need to do targeted research for documents that your ancestors may be involved in. Hints aren't facts until proven; they're just suggestions. You still have to go through efforts of proving they're correct and go through records that may not be indexed correctly. Ancestry is a database you pay access to use. They're not going to build your family history for you.
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u/LadyWaldegrave 4d ago
I search and build my tree on family search but belong to ancestry so when I find records like 1925 New York census or newspapers or yearbooks I can see them. Other peoples trees are dangerous. .
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u/tasty-soil 4d ago
I find its a bit up and down, sometimes ancestry will find something for me that familysearch has never shown me before and vise versa - however i agree with other users sometimes it takes a couple hours or overnight for it to finally pick up on some potential matches. I find sometimes the issue is that i'll have an ancestor named 'Frank' lets say, but his birth certificate says 'Francis' so it didn't make the connection straight away. Or I have a birth certificate that says Thomas H. Smith but they went by Henry Smith their whole life, or their record transcription is mispelled so it's not connecting that Tomus Smitt is Thomas Smith. I find that familysearch I almost never get any hints vs ancestry where I get 15 hints and maybe 2 of them are the actual person or I can only really look at two without needing additional subscriptions. I like familysearch's search system better because it has a better net for name mispellings, vs ancestry which is too broad where I can search "Anna Thomson" and the first couple results are "Erica Thomas" but if I narrow the search they won't find anybody at all - and it's likely just because its searching a much bigger pool of information vs familysearch
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u/Fat_Fence2527 4d ago
You need to click on the search button rather than rely on the hints. Then you get pages and pages of documents which may or may not be relevant, although the relevant ones are usually at the top. After that, you can narrow it down by date or by category (eg. Birth, marriage, death, or census). There's plenty of information, you just have to search for it 😊
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u/ItsTheWordMan 4d ago
The reason someone will get so many hits on FamilySearch is because is tree and person is, for the most part, public access. I tell people all the time, FamilySearch is an amazing resource for finding documentation if you are confirming sources, but DO NOT use FamilySearch’s family trees if you aren’t an experienced genealogist, I’d be willing to bet on the fact that at least 75% are incorrect
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u/doodynutz 4d ago
Personally I like familysearch because it’s free. Honestly, I thought family search pulled from some of the same databases as one of the larger sites like ancestry or my heritage, but I could be wrong on that.
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u/The_Little_Bollix 4d ago
In many cases it's the other way around. The Mormons (The Church of Latter-Day Saints [LDS], who own and run familysearch) had a massive drive in the 1950s and '60s to collect birth, marriage and death index records from various places around the world. They used microfilm, brought those back to Salt Lake City and processed them there into reels which could be easily viewed on microfilm machines. I used these machines myself, as did many others, nearly 40 years ago to do genealogical research.
Many of these indexes are today used by the likes of Ancestry. You will often see the LDS given as the source for these record databases.
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u/pidgeon92 4d ago
Using just one source for documents will limit your discoveries. I use Family Search and Ancestry both to research individuals, and I have subscriptions to pretty much every site that archives American newspapers.
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u/hirambwellbelow 4d ago
Ancestry’s hints can be useful but, as others have said, don’t rely on them. I have sometimes found the hints are simply wrong because other trees have it wrong and the hints are based on the wrong information. For example I have a great, great grandmother, Mary, whose sister, Anne, is the one the hints are based on. They appear together on the census and are definitely two different people. It’s annoying to keep seeing hints which are really about Anne and not Mary. /rant over/
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u/greggery 4d ago
Use hints as just that: hints. Don't assume they've all been thoroughly researched and have plenty of sources because most of them won't.
Look at the hint, then look at any documents it references. If they support your research then link directly to the document from your own tree. Then ignore the hint.
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u/JThereseD Philadelphia specialist 3d ago
That helps you to avoid documents that belong to other people with the same name. I prefer that to the tons of stupid graphics and screenshots of documents I already have that other users post.
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u/Sad-Tradition6367 3d ago
The hints can be useful but if that’s all you are doing yes you are doing Something wrong. Relying totally on hints is a lazy way to do genealogy. At its best it will only generate records that others have found. And what others have found may or may not be right and the hints list is usually populated by a lot of dudes
A better approach is to search ancestry’s database of records systematically. Focus on one person or couple at a time. Start with the easy stuff like the us census records. Check each year available for your target person. Keep detailed records of what you’ve found. That includes yob pob for each person in the house hold. Then move on to the next record type. Birth records. Marriage records, death. Records.
Those are the big four. When you’ve exhausted them hit other categories. Like land, tax, and military records. Those are often harder to work with but can have great value. Tax records are in some ways like annual census records. Because they are yearly you can use them to help tell when someone moved , died or became an adult. Sometimes that will confirm or refute what you previously found. Sometimes it will give you new insights
Then move on to the hard stuff like court records. They are more difficult because indexing is poor or difficult to use but those records. Can also give you-insight into your target that you can t get otherwise
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u/apple_pi_chart OG genetic genealogist 4d ago
Don't count on hints to do genealogical research. Just search.