Just posting this as a word of warning to those of you who use Ancestry.com to research your tree.

I was totally amazed at the amount of connections their Ancestral Hints came up with for my family tree that appeared to be correct (need I say more?)

It began to really get out of hand though, after I started adding these names to my tree. What I didn't realise was that the information being added through the Ancestral Hints function was a mixture of truth and lies. I discovered a whole line of Canadian cousins and thought "Wow". Then I discovered that they weren't really connected. The dates on the information I had added in were wrong - my family line jumped from 1840 to 1764 and then back to 1840 - eek.

I have had to then spend a lot of time going back over the connections and have now learned that there is an option on the comparison page to look at each entry individually and to select the ones that match - something I didn't know at the beginning when I made the huge blunder.

To cut a long story short ... I have gone from having 3,000 people in my family tree back to just over 1,000 and am now double checking everything I find on Ancestry.com. I just don't trust the information they give through the Ancestry Hints any more.

Also, the service used to be free, but when I click on a link to view the information I am being asked to subscribe to Ancestry.com - something that I can't afford to do at the moment (not sure if I really want to either, now)

Probably this was my own stupidity/naivity, whatever, but just thought it was worth passing on my lesson so that you don't fall into the same trap.

Kay