I don’t know if I’m just doing something wrong but I built my family tree and the website seems to have barely any information about my family at all. I found out more just checking out our national archives then what I found on this website. It’s maybe worth noting that I’m not in the US and it does appear to be somewhat US-centric.

The best it could find was a couple of enrollment records for voting and a single immigrant notification in an old newspaper. It didn’t find these either by itself, I had to manually go though the search system to find it. The OCR didn’t even get the spelling of the name correct.

I’m not sure what I expected but it was definitely better than this, especially for all the pay walls they throw up.

  • wjrii@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I was a spooky family mystery. There are records out there, particularly for the US, but you have think laterally and use resources outside their walled garden. US census records are only released after (IIRC) 70 years, so getting the 1950 census was a pretty big development. Beyond that, there are obituaries, phone books, newspapers, yearbooks, and others. I can even say from experience that the creepy “Radaris” style sites are usually leveraging some kernels of valid information in the free teaser data they show.