My ancestry.com experience in a nutshell

https://lemmy.world/post/1910196

My ancestry.com experience in a nutshell - Lemmy.world

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.

Clearly, you aren’t a super white American. My family tree got filled up easily up until the 1600s because I have a bunch of family members with nothing better to do than catalog our family tree. Apparently one half of my family came from Scotland in the 16th century so I can claim that I’m Scottish-American now.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Source: actual Scot

I think its so funny hearing people are American (whatever country their grandpappy came from) 😂

It’s because American doesn’t tell you anything about where your ancestry is from. You could be from anywhere in the world and be American. Scottish is a pretty specific things, as is just about any other nationality.

I still only say I’m American even though my family is largely from Scotland. WV Appalachian (I think Appalachian in general) has a large percentage of Scottish ancestry, and it also shares the same mountain range interestingly enough.