Ancestry.com Review

Ancestry.com is a easily the best known and most popular site for family research. It boasts having more records and members than any other site and therefore it makes sense for me to review it first.

Pros:

• Good selection of Irish records

• The best family tree app I have seen (in my opinion)

• Access to other members family trees (unless private)

• Record hints and suggestions

• Handy message boards

• DNA testing and cousin matching.

• Easy to navigate and use

• Free trial period

Cons:

• You have to pay to view records

• Some records that they hold are free to view elsewhere.

• Do not hold some very useful and interesting records that other sites do.

• Not a lot of detail in the transcribed records

I would recommend Ancestry as your homepage for all things genealogical. Take advantage of the free trial they offer and search as much as you can until it runs out. Use Ancestry to store your family tree as you do not need a current subscription you use or view your family tree.

The family tree function is clear and easy to use. You can store all types of information about a person on your tree as they have their own homepage of sorts.

Add siblings in every generation and bulk out your family tree, don't worry if it seems like pointless information as you can change the format of the tree to see only your descendants.

My Ancestry tree (family view)

Pedigree view

So by changing the tree view to pedigree, you can ignore all siblings and just look at your x times grandparents.

Records available on Ancestry

There are a 173 record collections on Ireland (as of September 2018).

The most useful are:

• Ireland, Catholic Parish Registers, 1655-1915

• Ireland, Select Births and Baptisms, 1620-1911

• Ireland, Select Catholic Marriage Registers, 1775-1942

• Public member trees

There are more that you will definitely use and link to your tree, but as I mentioned previously they are not necessarily useful because you can find them else where for free and with much more detail. So any information you find elsewhere can be added manually to an individual. The only difference will be is it will not be sourced and linked to an Ancestry document.

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