h What do you mean by 'fields'? When Ancestry.com asks 'What could it do better?' My response is always more data on the African American slaves. I have search slave owners' wills to track who the slaves were 'inherited' to. Those were some big families back then with a lot of slaves who worked the land and the home. Slaves were left not only to family members but to pay off debts owed and so on.
I should have said "receives" questions. He would help if asked, but he's never received any such inquiries...not that inquires of any nature are a common thing. Perhaps a couple of times a year they make their way to him. We have some number of black & white folk here who know that they share a common ancestor. The problem is that the births for the black children are not accurately documented. I imagine you've run into that as well. And surnames were possibly changed along with ownership. So what areas have you done this research in?
I was thinking the same thing. Maybe we could start an Ancestry topic to see if others have trod these paths, and have Ken move the comments over there.
Areas as in locations? Mostly, Georgia, Kentucky, Oklahoma. Surnames, yeah a lot. Not to mention the spelling of the name.
I think there is a thread on Ancestry.com but not specifically on personal research. We call dead ends 'brick walls.' If you can find the wall's weak spot you can break it down and move forward. A positive way to think about it. Dead ends you have to back track where you came from and start over. It was like that for me when I first started researching. When I think about it the wall really isn't the problem it's how you approach it which is the 'weak' spot - which or all questions (who, when, where) will break down the wall.
Spelling is an issue also for those who arrived through Ellis Island, especially with the "alphabet soup names" of eastern Europeans. I was hitting a stone wall until I discovered that my family's original last name ended with an "O' but was changed to an "A" on documents, I imagine from trying to decipher hand writing. A lot of family records were destroyed during WWII in Europe and make research impossible. A separate topic for ancestry sounds like a good idea.
There are a whole lot of people who are researching their ancestry, @Von Jones . Ancestry.com is a lot of help, but does not always provide answers that you are looking for. I would suggest that you do a dna sample with 23 and Me, because what they focus on is finding people (living people) who share your ancestry. Once you connect with people who are your (unknown) relatives and are also researching, they might be able to help you with some of the information you are looking for. An example from my search is that my grandmother came over from Germany in about 1902, and we have very little information about her before she married my grandfather and had my mother in 1905. However, once Robin and I made contact with people who were related to my grandmother’s sister, we have been learning more; because they had new information. I had no idea that my grandmother even had sisters and brothers. All my life, I thought she was an only child, like my mother, and like me. We would have never learned that information, had we not connected with their living relatives.
There are ancestry search groups on facebook, @Von Jones , and they sometimes have people called “search angels” that will help you find lost relatives, and I think that it does not cost, or at least not like an ancestry monthly charge would be. If you have facebook, you might look in the groups section and search for ancestry, DNA search, and other similar words, and see what you find. I just joined one that is for German relatives, since my maternal grandmother came from Germany, and it might help us to find out more about family history over there.
And once the Ellis Island official wrote down Brown" instead of "Brzinowskiovich", that's what you were for life. Your papers said Brown and you had to go by that. My father used to tell a joke about "Ole Olsen's Chinese Laundry". He said he went in one day and asked the Chinese gentleman who owned it why he was named "Ole Olsen". The man replied that he was in line at Ellis Island and when the man in front of him was asked his name, he replied "Ole Olsen." The official stamped his papers and said, "Welcome to America, Ole Olsen!" His turn was next and he was asked the same question. He replied "Sam Ting" and the official said, "Well, OK....welcome to America, Ole Olsen!"
Thanks to this thread, and the link above to familysearch.org, I just traced my family on my mother's father's side back to one couple---husband from Germany and wife from The Netherlands, early 1700's. On my father's father's side the trail still stops with two brothers from Virginia (could be West Virginia now), also in the 1700's. I still say there was something fishy going on there. Can't trace either grandmother. That link also led me to the 1940 raw household census data, 1949census.archives.gov. It has passed the 72 year limit to become public information. I guess after 2024 we might get the 1950 data?
Ancestry.com is cool and all but, in the end, it was all about establishing a DNA database. There have already been arrests made based on voluntarily submitted DNA samples. Even if the person submitting the DNA sample doesn't commit any crimes, they can determine if the culprit is related to someone who has and thus narrow the field. In one case that I saw in a documentary, the rapist was the brother of someone who had submitted their DNA. Actually, while I was interested to get my DNA results from Ancestry.com, I became disillusioned when they changed it all around several months later. They did the same thing to my wife's, changing her's around even more than they did mine. I had all the same stuff, but they changed the percentages.
Little naive me never thought of that voluntary aggregation of our nation's DNA for law enforcement use, but I've not sent in a sample for analysis merely because I tend to be universally mistrusting. A quick internet search (for what it's worth) shows where Ancestry.com has always fought such law enforcement requests for DNA and prevailed...so far They've not fought requests for other data ("basic subscriber data") that they claim they are required to turn over under existing statute. For the curious, they post a Guide for Law Enforcement on their site. Regarding that rapist story...according to this article, in 2018 law enforcement tracked down the brother of a suspected rapist using basic Ancestry.com research tools and then asked the guy to voluntarily provide a DNA sample directly to law enforcement to compare to the samples they saved from a 1969 rape/homicide (the guilty brother having already died in 2001.) He provided a sample, and his now-deceased brother was confirmed to have been guilty of the crime. There is no word as to their being any DNA in the possession of Ancestry.com. That being said, in today's Amerika, vandals & arsonists are peaceful protesters while parents are domestic terrorists, so use your own level of trust (if you have any left) as a guide.
I have seen a few crime documentaries in which the crime was solved by data submitted to DNA services like Ancestry.com, although they did not name Ancestory.com specifically. There are other businesses that provide a similar service. Nevertheless, Ancestry.com is being sold to The Blackstone Group which, in separate cases in 2018 and 2019, settled a lawsuit against them for giving guest lists from Motel 6, which they own, to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement without a warrant. During this period in which the American people have been unable to work, and in which landlords have been prohibited from collecting rents on their properties, The Blackstone Group has been acquiring single-family homes and other properties. The Blackstone Group and China are major property owners in the United States now. Principals of The Blackstone Group have close connections with Barack Obama and the Clintons and their entourages. They appear in the Podesta emails often and have been major donors to both of their campaigns.