How do ancestry websites work? Is it even possible to link back generations like that?

[Ted Pack]

There are over 400,000 free sites devoted to genealogy. They work different ways.

GenForum and the query boards at Ancestry.com are query boards. They are free. They work like Y!A, except there is one for every county in the USA, shire in the UK, province in Canada, and country elsewhere; also 10's of thousands devoted to specific surnames. So, if your ancestors came from Monroe County, VA (Now WV), you'd post a query there about them, and someone might answer it. The boards are much smaller than Y!A, much more focused, and don't get as many "wut is my ancestory? pic included" questions.

The US Gen Web has a site for each county. They range in quality. The best have wills, deeds, census transcriptions, maps, tombstone transcriptions, and biographies from those wonderful ole "Biographical History of --- County" books. The worst don't.

Some sites - Roots Web World Connect, GenCircles and the Public Member Trees part of Ancestry have nothing but user-submitted data. Some public trees are well-researched. Some are not. They can be clues. They can also lead you astray, if you trust but don't verify.

Ancestry.com has 30,000+ data bases of genealogical data that subscribers can access 24/7, from home. How those work is you get up before your wife can think of things for you to do, pull up whatever tree you are working on, and start looking for people in, for instance, the US Census from 1930 back to 1850. If the person in question married in Missouri, you look on the data base of Missouri Marriages to see who she married; then you look for her under her married name in the next census (ie, Mary Smith married Hezekiah Kablonski in 1905; you look for her in 1910, to see if her birth place and year match your Mary Smith. If she is living next door to her parents, or with her parents, or her widowed mother is living with her, you can be pretty sure that's the Mary Smith you are after.)