Sites that bring researchers together

Ancestry is a great site for hints, online searches and documentation. However, as you will find out if you do much research there, there are a lot of newbies out there. And, as I was guilty of when I first started working on my tree, I would click and add without giving it much thought. Later, those clicks and adds would get copied to someone else's tree and then in effect be given much more weight than either of us had intended.

On Ancestry it is not uncommon to find glaring mistakes of parents being 90 years older than their kids. I have found census records of african americans with the same name linked to white folks. All in all,  the trees there are not dependable.

On the other side of the spectrum are Wikitree, Findagrave and Family Search. All three are great places to work with others on your trees. The least popular so far is Wikitree. It is a cumbersome interface and they have a lot of rules about posting information on the site. However, what all three sites share, is that there should be only one record for each person in history. Findagrave uses as its source point, the burial record or headstone.  This generally gives one a great meeting point. Findagrave can attract descendants from all over, looking at the site. There is one grave, hence one record. I have yet to run across someone posting incorrect father's mother's siblings etc.. on this site though I guess it could happen. I have found a couple duplicates for information, but all in all, I have used it to find some excellent researchers who are managing pages for my ancestors and have gotten some great history from it.

Familysearch is another awesome site. In the past year or so they have instituted a system where you can actually tag a name in a census document and attach it to your family tree. If someone later comes along and tries to tag that same record, the person in your tree will be suggested. This is great because theoretically on each census there should be one and only one record for each individual. When there is a conflict you can discuss right there on the record who's research is better.  Once you find your ancestor and you clean everything on their page up to your liking, you can also tag their record. Anytime anyone visits or makes changes to it, you will get a notification. That way, you  will see whatever additional information they have added. Also if you believe that information to be false, you will have a place to note that, change it back and/or contact the person that made the change.

These are all built-in features that work much better than Ancestry's limited tracking system.