Friday Favorites- Learning about Your Ancestors

I really love doing genealogy. Part of that comes from my church background, but it is also something that I find to be so interesting. So today I am going to share some of my favorite links for learning about your ancestors and the pros and cons to each.

Family Search
Pros
-Free!
-Quite a few resources, including social security death index, and a few censuses
Cons
-Not many sources
-Have to be careful of user uploaded information that may be incorrect.

Pilot Family Search
Pros
-Free!
-More records.
Cons
-Some information is incorrectly indexed due to how it was recorded. (More about this later)
-The search engine isn't always as intuitive as you would like, so you may need to search things a few different ways to find something.
-Is a pilot program, so still has a lot of tweaking to do.

Google
Pros
-Good for general information on surnames, countries, etc.
-Occasionally you'll find a website with complete family trees.
Cons
-It's just the search engine so your results may be muddled with typical search junk.
-A lot of information out there.
-As with all information on the internet, it can be full of mistakes.



Ancestry
Pros
-A lot of resources
-Worldwide Resources
-Lot's of users willing to share their findings
-Good search program
-User friendly
-Save Features
-Free trial
Cons
-Price. I must admit it can be pricey, but I have reached the point where all of the free routes have pretty much run out of information for me. My husband and I both do it, so we share one account (which we both can be on at the same time).
-Need credit card for free trial, which is kind of a pet peeve for me. However, it is very easy to cancel.


Here's a site if you want to help index records to make them free for everyone.
Indexing
Indexing is where you look at a record and type it into the computer, thus creating a digital, searchable copy of the record.
The reason I like to do indexing is it helps me to learn how records were recorded. I learn how census takers writing is sometimes easily confused, etc. It helps me to understand the records I am using to make my records.


Hopefully, you'll find these sites interesting! If you are interested, I can do more entries in the future on this subject. Let me know by leaving a comment below!