What's the difference between myfamily.com and ancestry.com?

Question

Both these sites are run by the same company. And both encourage you to set up a family tree on-line. What's the difference between the two? What are the advantages of one over the other? Which one do you use?

Answer 1

Ancestry is busily buying up a lot of their competetors, like rootsweb.

Ancestry is a subscription site and well worth the price.  You can find many source records here.  It has a large community so when you upload a family tree, it can search all the records and see if there are records for that person.

myfamily has other uses, like the family tree.

Answer 2

Ancestry.Com has records, mailing lists and message boards as well as family trees. My family.com just has family trees.

You have to be very cautious about taking as absolute fact everything you see in family trees on ANY website, free or not free.  They are subscriber submitted (by folks like you and me) and are mostly not documented or poorly documented.  You might see different info on the same people from different subscribers. Then you will see repeatedly the same info from different subscribers on the same people, but that is no guarantee at all it is correct.  It is obvious a lot of people copy without verifying. The information should only be used as CLUES as to where to get the documentation.  Also, don't expect to find living people in the family trees as that is considered an invasion of privacy and can lead to identity theft.

Actually some people upload other people's family trees into theirs which means they wind up with a lot of junk.  Unfortunately, Genealogy.Com encourages that.

Ancestry.Com has all the U. S. censuses through 1930.  The 1940 and later are not available to the public yet.  They have transcribed them but you can also look at the original images.  Now, there are errors in their transcriptions, but when you see the originals, you can have pity on the transcribers.  They have immigration and military records and indexes to vital records of many states.  I believe they have more records on their website tthan any genealogy website.

Rootsweb is a free site and has some records but not as much as Ancestry.Com.  If you find Ancestry.Com too pricey, your public library might have a subscription to it.