Has anyone used ancestry.com to do geneological research? I started a trial membership and I'm not sure that I will pay to keep it because I think that their database only contains the last census record for a first name/surname.
I have found both of my parents' families on the 1930 census, but ancestry.com doesn't seem to have their 1920 or 1910 census records. I know my father's parents permanently entered the US on July 19, 1905 at Ellis Island. I have copies of their records from the ship's manifest, so I even know the name of the ship that they came on. However, they are not in ancestry.com's 1910 or 1920 census records.
The same with my mother's family. Although I don't have the exact dates on when they arrived in the US, my grandfather came between 1910 and 1913, so he should be in the 1920 census. He's not. My grandmother came to the US in 1919 or 1920. She's not anywhere, either, until 1930.
I suppose if all you want to do is find names and birthdates/places, I guess ancestry.com is okay, but I'm looking for more than that. Census records contain tons of information. The 1930 census asks respondents if they owned a radio and if they were employed in the past year. It also gives their race, their naturalization status, their ages when married, and occupation. One interesting thing that I found out about my father's family is that one of my aunts and uncles rented the apartment in their house to a black couple as well as took in two of my single uncles as boarders. Italians and blacks living on the same block or in the same house wasn't all that uncommon in the Ellicott District as I found a several black families among the Italians on this aunt and uncle's street.
Both families moved around alot. My father's family moved from Seneca Street in Buffalo to Niagara Falls (my dad was born there in 1918) to at least 2 different farms in North Collins (unless the roads had different names then). My mother's family moved around Black Rock and Grant/Amherst prior to 1950: Clay, Churchill, Kail Streets, and then Greeley and then Marion. The family folklore says that my grandmother was a little Polish real estate flipper who bought houses and then sold them to buy better houses. She ended up a grocery store proprietor. If I have to drive into Buffalo or use inter-library loan to get the rest of the census data, then I can't see paying $150 plus for ancestry.com for a year.
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