r/Ancestry

Hello friends,

I understand that if you don’t like something, don’t spend money on it. However, this is getting to be an increasingly larger problem in society as a whole. Companies get so large, that it doesn’t matter if you don’t spend money with them, your vote does not matter. They get money from everybody else.

My interest in genealogy was sparked last year when I inherited my grandfather‘s research. He had an ancestry account of which he kept some of his source material. Before I closed, I went ahead and downloaded it, but working with other family members we chose to continue using the ancestry database so that we could reference grandfather’s work.

Last year, I was frustrated with newspapers.com. You would get hints, but not be able to view them because they were blocked behind a pay wall. Further, they just launched fold three, where they have migrated all of their military databases. Now you will need a subscription for that material. It is just frustrating, because they are such a large company and they receive so much in subscription dollars, you’d think that they would offer some of these things because of the fact that it is their service.

The family is looking into potentially sending off somebody’s genetic material for testing. While researching, I discovered that ancestry is the only company that won’t accept genetic data from other companies. They are making it so you have no choice, but to spend money with them, even if their service is antiquated.

I realize it’s pointless, and I am screaming into the void, but goodness gracious can we just get a break as regular people? I guess genealogy is a rich man sport like the rest of them.

Hi from New Zealand. For decades now I've been looking for Richard Jenkins who was my Great Grandfather. He seems to disappear from Wales after marrying my Great Grandmother Mary James in Goginan (near Aberystwyth) in 1893. They had my Grandmother Mary in 1894 and another daughter Elizabeth in 1898 however there is a chance he wasn't Elizabeth's father.

Mary declared that she was married, and head of the house on all her census forms, but Richard isn't ever living at the household on census night. Where could he be? My best guess is he went to America or Canada or similar.

He's my brick wall and it's driving me nuts. I can see he was a lead miner living in Goginan in the 1891 census before he married Mary James who lived nearby. So I found the link of how they met. And I found their marriage information. But I can't find him on any other census nor death records. It doesn't help that there was another Richard Jenkins in Aberystwyth at the time who was a stonemason but that isn't him.

Richard was born in 1870 at Llanfihangel Glen Yr Glynn, Cardiganshire, Wales and by the time he was two years old had moved about 70 miles to Llanbadarn Trefeglwys. His parents were Stephen Jenkins, (who worked as a Cooper), and Mary Griffiths. Richard's siblings were Margaret, John, Edward and David.

It's so weird to me that none of my Welsh family ever asked my Grandmother Mary Fazakerley (nee Jenkins) about her father when she was alive. None of my cousins or uncles or aunts know anything about him. He's like a ghost.

Can anybody help? I'm so stuck.

Friends who see my tree research occasionally ask for help getting started with their genealogy. I really enjoy doing the research for them. Over 30 years I’ve done about 20 projects for friends. I usually spend about 2 months just compiling data available on the internet and then creating a nice presentation. The easy stuff.

In every case my friends have been extremely impressed and appreciative. Many have been inspired to pick up the work themselves. I’ve found pictures of ancestors that my friends had never seen, books that ancestors had written and even artwork.
In none of these projects have I unearthed anything scandalous, traumatic or upsetting to anyone. Just the occasional birth soon after the wedding, a child who died in infancy that wasn’t talked about, or a previous marriage no one was aware of. But these have always been so far back that they were just interesting or amusing, not troubling.

But heres the weird part: hardly any of these friends have ever shared the work to their immediate or extended families. It would seem as though that would be their first impulse. When I ask “ how did your mother/sister/cousin like the project?” They typically say they didn’t show it to anyone. Why? Just didn’t get around to it. Or some other evasive answer. I’m baffled.

I’ve been digging into the recent Canadian citizenship changes under Bill C-3, and I think a lot of people with Canadian ancestry may qualify without realizing it.

Most people assume citizenship by descent only applies if a parent was born in Canada, but the newer rules appear to go much further in some cases. I’ve seen examples where eligibility passed through grandparents and earlier generations because the citizenship rights were restored retroactively.

The biggest challenge seems to be documentation, especially for families that moved back and forth between Canada and the U.S. generations ago. Early Quebec and Ontario records, name spelling issues, incomplete church records, and proving each generation can get complicated fast.

What surprised me most is how many people probably have a qualifying ancestor and just never looked into it because the family left Canada a long time ago.

Has anyone here started the process yet or unexpectedly discovered they qualified through an older ancestor?

trying to figure out which birth date is more likely correct for an ancestor.

his headstone (which i’ve seen in person & on FindAGrave) says he was born april 2, 1907. but his WWII draft registration card, which i found through Ancestry citing the National Archives, says august 22, 1908.

unfortunately i probably won’t find a birth certificate because he was born in the Russian Empire, & from what i understand births/baptisms there were usually recorded in church “metric books” instead.

which source would you personally consider more reliable here? the draft card since he likely gave the information himself, or the headstone? & how would you record it in your tree for now?

My dad has told me multiple times that my grandmother's father was a grand dragon of the KKK in Pontiac Michigan, until he had to move down to Alabama. How would I go about proving or disproving this? I know he was a grand dragon and he gave his position to one of his priests when he left but that he brought his church with him. My father also claims to have found a check book for The Church of the Empire of the KKK in my great grandfather's old stuff.

I don't really know if this is the best place to post this, but there has been stories about my maternal grandfather getting a girlfriend pregnant, and another story of my maternal grandmother getting pregnant and I am trying to see if I can find who these people are.

So the story about my grandfather is that he had a girlfriend in highschool. She ended up getting pregnant, but didn't want to raise the baby. Supposedly her sister was married and wasn't able to have children, so the girlfriend gave custody to her sister. The girlfriend would have likely went to highschool in Lansing, Iowa, and my grandfather went to highschool in Desoto, Wisconsin. The girlfriend's dad was from Genoa, Wisconsin, and I think his name had Leland somewhere in there (maybe with a different spelling, but it would be pronounced lee-land) but I could be wrong. My grandfather lived in Genoa at the time, and the girlfriend might have as well.

The story about my grandmother is that she, while married to my grandfather, got pregnant. For some backstory, they had two children (my mother being the oldest and my aunt being the youngest), and my mom was born August 8, 1988 and my aunt being born in 1994. My mom and my aunt ended up finding an ultrasound photo from August 8, 1989, exactly one year after my mom was born. My grandmother said that it was my mom and the hospital's machine had the wrong date, but the baby in the ultrasound was not developed enough to be her. My mom wasn't born premature either, so that doesn't make any sense. I've thought about the possibility of her maybe having an abortion or a miscarriage, but I'm not sure. She could have also decided to give it up for adoption if she had it, but no one knows. Currently the ultrasound photo is missing, so we really don't have a lot of leads to this.

My mom has taken a DNA test, but it hasn't shown anything that could point us to who these people are. We can't really get any answers from either of my grandparents, since they will both take these secrets to the grave. My grandma did confirm that my grandfather got the girl pregnant, but did not elaborate. If anyone has any ideas of how to find these people, please let me know. I'm not really sure what to do about all of this.

This may be an odd request, but my family tree is currently stored on the ancestry website. I want to pull my tree offline with all the source images and everything attached. I was able to do that with the tree import feature on RM11.

What I want to do now is "un-ancestrify" my tree by converting all sources to proper Evidence Explained citations that cite the original database source and not just Ancestry.

My issue is that my ADHD will not allow me to go through source-by-source to make these adjustments. I have tried using AI to lessen the manual work, but I keep finding issues in what it outputs which is unhelpful.

Is there a person/service that I can pay to help me get my offline tree sourced properly and ready for me to add to it in the future?

Since I've done this a few times now, I thought I'd write a quick "How to" for other genealogists.

This is the basic prescription.

1. You're going to need to download and have a *paid* account on Claude. Why paid? Because the free account just doesn't offer enough computation time.

2. Get used to using the Claue App on your desktop/laptop. Specifically, put it in Co-Work mode - which enables it to read files on your computer and set up a "Project" space for your genealogical work, like a directory called "Genealogy".

3. Download your GEDCOM file from Ancestry, and put it in your Genealogy project directory for Claude.

4. In Co-Work mode, instruct Claude to read your GEDCOM file, and look for the ancestor of interest by name, where the wall goes up. Let's call him "Edward Forgotten".

5. Tell Claude to search for Edward Forgotten on your family tree on Ancestry. com. Claude will probably need to access it through your browser, so grant permission to do so.

6. Finally, tell Claude to search for the documentation which will break down the wall. For example "Find Edward Forgotten's documentation near where he died, such as his marriage record, baptism record or birth record."

The response to this, if it is like mine, will be a description of that documentation, pulling out the key information - like exact date, location, parents, etc.

7. Really finally - READ all the discovered documentation. You want to be at least as familiar with this, as you are other documentation on the tree, and this is to confirm that claude did an accurate job of reading the documentation.

That's gotten me two generations of parents beyond my brick wall for my maternal grandmother's maternal grandmother in Denmark. So now, I have all the way back to her paternal grandfather.

The accounts cost money - so I won't say it's worth it. But I've found it extremely helpful in getting information that many hours of dilligent searching had not uncovered.

I've been using an app called Family Tree for the last two years. I started it when I was doing my husband's genealogy as a surprise Christmas present. I uploaded about 300 people, showed it to him for Christmas, and then realized it wasn't shareable for him to have access to. He figured out how to export it, email the files to himself, and then import, but it was a pain. I'd love to be able to share this with his sister who lives in another state. This doesn't seem like it would be a difficult app to create and I would even pay for something like that. Any ideas?

I live in an extremely small rural area in West Virginia that used to be a coal camp. Idc to share on Reddit because of the anonymity. My last name is Sizemore and for some reason despite being in the middle of nowhere in West Virginia, ancestry somehow pulled up my whole family. My grandpa that I never met who died in 1987 died from drinking, his dad, my great grandpa was a coal miner and died by a rifle wound to the chest by his own son because he was drunk and violent and his son decided to shoot him in the chest and kill him, and my 9th great grandpa was hung by Englishmen because he was Native American and he was nicknamed “a scoundrel.” It’s been crazy learning about my family lol

My family ethnicity is British and Native American

So, I'm Brazilian, and in my family tree on my mother's side, I've already traced back to ancestors from the year 1840 (I'm a beginner).

But I can't go into my father's side of the family because they're from the Middle East, and their names are very common there and all over the world, like Mohammad (every Arab has that name).

And I only have old letters from them, sent to my love. I've already managed to translate them and find the address and postal code, but I have no way to leave Brazil and go there... What do I do?

-Looking to complete Bill C-3.

-So far utilzied Ancestory, Myheritage, and Massacheusetts online resources.

-Found My grandfather ( after 20 plus years; my father never knew anything about him... I guess after a while, didnt want too :( )

-Found Name of his parents (My Great Grand Parents) and their birth places ( Alberta and Quebec) on my grandfathers birthcertificate from Massacheusetts.

- So I have their (Paternal Great Grandparents) names, Places of Birth (respectively) and their ages. (Deduced from age on my grandfathers Birthcert etc).

(Frank Piche b.1897 Alberta and Rose Deschamp b.1897 P.Q., Lived in Hampden County, Mass. in 1927. (Birth year of my grandfather. )

- But then the brick wall. I cannot find any info on his parents besides their names on his BC.

- Im happy to continue to do the research / leg work, just not sure how to proceed.

-Ive heard of baptism records, board crossing records etc. Any other advice or direction would be greatly appreciated. Best Regards.. B