I don’t know if I’m just doing something wrong but I built my family tree and the website seems to have barely any information about my family at all. I found out more just checking out our national archives then what I found on this website. It’s maybe worth noting that I’m not in the US and it does appear to be somewhat US-centric.

The best it could find was a couple of enrollment records for voting and a single immigrant notification in an old newspaper. It didn’t find these either by itself, I had to manually go though the search system to find it. The OCR didn’t even get the spelling of the name correct.

I’m not sure what I expected but it was definitely better than this, especially for all the pay walls they throw up.

  • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    It’s because American doesn’t tell you anything about where your ancestry is from. You could be from anywhere in the world and be American. Scottish is a pretty specific things, as is just about any other nationality.

    I still only say I’m American even though my family is largely from Scotland. WV Appalachian (I think Appalachian in general) has a large percentage of Scottish ancestry, and it also shares the same mountain range interestingly enough.