You just have to keep giving them more and more private information about yourself and your unwitting family, then something magic happens.

its just another way they collect data and track people.

Definitely US-centric. You have to pay extra to get records from some countries. Works very well for people in the US

Clearly, you aren't a super white American. My family tree got filled up easily up until the 1600s because I have a bunch of family members with nothing better to do than catalog our family tree. Apparently one half of my family came from Scotland in the 16th century so I can claim that I'm Scottish-American now.

I've been paying $25 a month to run into relatives that all have their trees set to PRIVATE.

They're my cousins / second-cousins, and I'm not sure who their parents are or how they fit into my tree.

The site lets you look at US Census data... from the 1950s or some shit. So I can piece together family information upwards half a dozen ways to my grandparents and their parents and so on, but I can't seem to get any info from the system for anyone born after the 1950s.

I keep paying because I'm trying to solve a spooky family mystery.

I thought if I put my name and my parents and grandparents in, it would help me build a tree. Then it was so who are your great grandparents? Bitch that's why I'm here!?

Most of these services are US-centric because a lot of the necessary records to provide the information isn’t public in many countries outside of the US.

Birth records, death records, marriage records, divorce records, voting records, criminal records, etc. is considered public information in much of the US. Even address information can be found publicly and immigration records become available to the public after a certain time.

In a lot of countries, especially in many European countries, these are hard to access for people that aren’t the subject of these records, if accessible at all.

For example while court records are public in much of Europe, often times the names of private persons are censored because it’s not deemed necessary to know who the parties are to be able to check if the courts make fair decisions.
This automatically excludes criminal and divorce information from disseminating into the public.

Some countries will make some records public once the subject of those records have passed for X amount of years, but that’s still pretty rare.

As such services like these have limited use outside the United States.

I built my family tree and thought - oh neat, even more ancestors to disappoint.

I use familysearch.org. It’s free! I’m not sure what country you’re in, but I’ve found a lot of info on European, Italian, and some African ancestors through there.

It’s a group effort so if nobody in your country uses it then it’s going to be a lot less helpful to you.

I don’t know how it gets started in an area because presumably everyone else you know would get the same experience as you when they sign in so how does it encourage people to start building the knowledge base up?

I know that it works in the UK. My wife has used it and found a lot of useful info but had to add her own info too.

Least you had a free trial so that's something

I'm on 23 and me and some of my long lost cousins from the south keep trying to hook up with me.