Find Ancestors

Reply to Simon Knight-Smith A few things about your gripes with the site. The site has 3 functions 1. A tool for people to add what they know about their own family tree. Yes there are lots of them out there and most are clumbersome and non internet based. 2. Once you have added what you know, it may encourage you to investigate more about your own ancestry using methods like the one you state. That can not be a bad thing - from a lot of the messages and emails we have recieved are from people saying they have always wanted to do this and the site has given them the spark to try. 3. Your details are available then to search and if you see what could be a match then you can contact the person who added the data and verify it through dialogue. If someone has already done the hard work find your Aunt Gladys Gumtree then why do it again! When we started FriendsReunited there were already loads of methods of tracking people down - through alumni and school associations and dozens of people tracing and search tools. What FR did was make it simple and central. Surely that is a similar problem with researching family history. We don't claim to be a purist geneology site. We do plan to add more help text and tips to show how to find public records - the sites only been up 5 days! Perhaps you can help provide some more detailed knowledge about geneology to our site through information pages that we could build.