I've been in the genealogy game a while, long enough to remember the early days of microfilm and microfiche and being kicked off the micro readers at the Family History Centre after two hours because there were other people waiting. In the early days of the internet, ROOTs mailing lists came along which put us in touch with fellow researchers. Many a package of photocopied documents was sent and received in the mail.
It was a time when research seemed full of possibilities but hunting down records was miles slower than it is these days. Perhaps the slowness of discovery was good in its own way as I know that I took more time to think of next steps to find out more about family lines. At the same time, relationships were developed with fellow researchers. When I started to add travel to my family history repertoire, I met up with more than one person I'd met online so that we could visit places our distant family had once lived and worked.
By the time that I started genealogy travel, the first big databases were coming online. I was leery of Ancestry when I first encountered it, only using the library edition which allows limited free access. Money, of course, was a restraint. I could have just subscribed to the database for one country to save money but the difficulty with that was that I resided in Canada but most of my research was in the UK. From what I could gather, if I wanted to subscribe to Ancestry for just one country, that would be for the country I lived in. I took out a subscription with Find My Past instead.
As family history research drew me in further, I eventually subscribed to both Ancestry and Find My Past. I still do even though I use them much more sparingly than in earlier days. These days I spend more time hunting down stories than growing family lines. It's good to have the records on the big genealogy databases handy to hunt down references or to do those last pieces of research to fill out the story.
I am surprised at what I find there, particularly on Ancestry. Personally I only keep a bare bones family tree on the site. It is rare that a document is attached to a person on my tree. It there is one, I've usually taken it from something that another researcher has posted. My wariness of Ancestry has continued to this day. I don't post my family history finds and treasures on the site because somewhere along the way I must have read the fine print. I was reminded of that as I read The Genealogical Sublime. In the chapter on Ancestry.Inc, author Julia Creet reminds the reader that they are giving Ancestry the rights to the information they are posting on the site.
Reading the information in Creet's book reminded me of my own love/hate relationship with the genealogy giant. It also reminded me of what someone said in a genealogy group I was attending. The gist of the comment was that the researcher only took information from trees with source documents because that showed the depth of their research. I can see where one might think that but perhaps that family tree you are hesitant to use because of the lack of source documents belongs to someone who read the fine print on the Ancestry site.
Sources:
Creet,
Julia. The Genealogical Sublime. University
of Massachusetts Press, 2020 p 91-94
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