Is one Family History site any better than another?

your nationality is determined by where you are bornkiwibird so your relatives are Irish at that time there was no NI or Republic it was all Ireland

My daughter and her husband use My Heritage. They subscribe and manage the site, but other family members can access it. I have no idea how it compares with other sites, but I enjoy having it as a record.
I think my daughter put in quite a bit of work checking census records etc and putting the details on the site. Some names are easier than others: looking for a "Clarke" in London or a "Locke" in Scotland wasn't fruitless. When it was all linked up on the site we found tbat some relationships in the last couple of generations were not as we'd been told (birth dates, marriage dates, parentage etc).
My Heritage helps you link up with other family trees which appear to have the same people (place/date of birth, etc); if you want you can check out their trees and "piggyback" on their research, and send personal messages.

I've done very well on a site called 'Roots Chat' I managed to trace my paternal Irish Great Grandmother and her parents. I found out a lot about her, her marriage, where she lived, moved to and where/when she died. I also found out where my maternal grandfather fought in WW1, from 1915 - (demob) 1919.

Has anyone else had a fight on their hands to claim their ancestors?
Yes! I am very meticulous about my research and check and double-check to make sure I have the right person, but some other researchers just add someone into their tree because they have the 'right name' without checking further details.

They just ignore any messages pointing out that perhaps they may need to re-check

I'm hoping someone can let me know the answer to this question. My Great great great grandfather and his wife, both Scottish from Perthshire, left Scotland in the early 1800's and moved to Northern Ireland where they then had, and raised some children. My question is: with these children having both a Scottish mother and a Scottish father, but being born and brought up in Ireland, does this mean they are 'Irish' or are they 'Scottish'? What determines one's ethnicity? Parents or place of birth? Can someone tell me?

I've never done it but a friend who uses it a lot swears by FMP

My daughter bought me a DNA testing kit for Christmas 2016 from 23andme, my brother bought the kit also. Yes it's interesting and thought provoking so much information to get your head round. You can contact people who have threads of your DNA who wish to be contacted. There is also a sharing tool which allow you to upload to other people if you wish or upload to other analysing webs sites. You could quite easily spends hours on the sight if you wanted. It also covers health and traits which is interesting. It's not for everyone but it's another tool for finding living people with threads of your DNA.

The various sights can work out expensive so I joined my local Family History Society for £12 for the year. This allows me to research at their centre twice a week. They have Ancestry and Find My Past. I also use the free sight Family Search.

I have both ancestry and genes reunited but the one I use most is Scotlands people its a much easier to navigate site and its not expensive I f you have any scottish ancestors give it a go

sarahc446655

Sarah I went to Ancestry DNA for my test. It gave me absolutely no surprises at all. With the FH information I already had it proved very accurate indeed.

I do have a problem in that my dads father was unknown. he was born in 1915. So there is little chance of getting anything there . (There are a couple of suspects.)

I own up to having three sites . My original Kith and Kin then Find my Past and Ancestry with the DNA test . Kith and Kin was a one time buy . Rather quirky but all three sites have their different good points .
I now work with two lap tops at a time the old one has a wonky screen which will not close but is still useful. Two laptops need two different mice . It gets quite confusing .
Ancestry is good for hints etc. Find my past seems to have
Data bases which are easier to use than Ancestry. You can access parish records directly rather than just see the transcript
The ancestry stuff has caused a big surge in interest but the rigour of checking the sources seem quite poor. Some one offering me some Powell's from Gloucestershire when I knew mine were all east midlands.
Go back to the 1800s and many people could not read .which gives lots of people using the same names and repeating then down through the families.
I have two Powell families doing this in Cambridgeshire. Almost certainly two brothers. It really does need care to attributing the right relatives to a family.
My direct paternal line does that . A whole cluster around Chester.
Fun though playing detectives.

So many records have been transcribed with terrible spelling mistakes ninethenana because the original manuscripts were badly written or were in fact themselves misspelt - names written down just as they were pronounced, eg a great-aunt called 'Honor' was on the original census and transcribed as 'Ona'.
So, as 00mam00 says, untick the 'exact' boxes and you may get more results.
On Ancestry you have a chance to correct those which you know are wrong and give a reason.

Ninathenana, are you ticking the 'exact' box next to the facts you put in? Somehow Ancestry doesn't recognise anyone until you untick 'exact' then they will come up with a result that has all the details you had put in, weird!

Our local records office in Winchester has free access to many of the family research websites and are very helpful.

Be aware Ancestry is rubbish if your family were Scottish . I paid to join and kept getting negative results even for my parents . I complained to Ancestry and insisted I got a refund . They eventually gave me one and blamed the Scottish government for not letting them share the data . I blame the Scottish government for a lot but this was a new one for me . Scotland's people is good but expensive .

I have recently come to the conclusion that I like FMP best.

Despite entering exact names and d.o.b. and sometimes d.o.d I have never found any of my relatives on any site. Including my parents or grandparents. It just says no results found

Yes, Surrey library at Farnham offers findmypast free. Maybe other Surrey libraries, too. Try:- www.surreycc.gov.uk/libraries to check on yours.

Thanks for the tip! I will try that, so wish me luck. Fingers crossed....

Genes reunited is good for that. You do have to check the facts that some people post, though. Not all of them are accurate, and people tend to latch onto things and accept them and pass them on as correct.

mrsmopp I found a Jones in Wales by putting all I knew (not much) on as many genealogy forums as I could find via Google. Turns out the man in question's family were researching too and got in touch.
Worth trying?

I agree Elegran. It's a minefield. Her year of birth varies with each census then I found her at an address I knew was right in the 1939 census, and applied for a cert quoting the DOB on the 1939 census - it came back no trace. Her surname was Jones in Wales, so a BMD search gives too many results, then her birth name may not even be Jones! Talk about a needle in a haystack......
Dear Gran, who are you??

Iif you think that you have her correct name and her approximate DOB within a few years, youmight find her yourself by searching on www.freebmd.org.uk/ That would get you the quarter of the year, and the reference for the certificate. Then you can send for a certificate using that reference.

Of course, if she was adopted her new parents may have given her a new birthday - perhaps the day of her adoption. Perhaps a new name too!

Sarah, that Agra link just takes you to a site about setting up a domain name - is there an error in the link? I would like to ask a genealogist to trace my grandmothers background as in one of the censuses states that she is adopted.
I had her DOB and sent for a birth cert and the reply was that she wasn't born on the day we had. So I cannot find her. I can't solve this on my own.

I would like to take this opportunity to warn people about this current fashion for having your DNA analyzed to establish your ancestry. We can all acknowledge the result of being given in-accurate information, with out knowing if the people doing the test are actually qualified. (Ancestry is big on this at the moment pushing special offers all the time.)
I think the safest bet is through someone at a university department - where the test for this was first created.

Don't forget local family history societies if your family has been centred on one area for many years. Ours is excellent and there are always members willing to give advice/help or even search alongside you until you've got underway. Often they have their own BMD files and Parish Registers on CD for you to explore. If someone else in another branch of your family is also researching it may be worth using the same software so that you can pool results. There are amazing discoveries to be made out there, for example we even found a relative who 'went missing' over a hundred years ago - they had done a runner to the USA but we'd never have known otherwise.