[masraum]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Be warned, ancestry.com is addictive. I spent a lot of time over a year and a half doing my family tree. Fascinating and a REAL TIME SUCK.

One of my wife’s friends saw my tree, and started on hers. She spend tons of time on it.

Emphasis added. I think I signed up for a free month or maybe just decided to spend $20 for a months-worth a year or two ago. You can easily spend 8-12 hours a day going down the many rabbit holes.

You just have to be careful. With the scanned documents, you can view the documents and have a pretty good idea if they are the person that you're looking for. If you're looking at other folks' family trees, then I generally don't trust them at all, and use a "verify then trust" model. It's like when doing a math-word problem, "you had $500, and put it in a savings account for a year at 5% interest, how much money do you have?" and the answer that you come up with is $12,878. Yeah, clearly that's not the answer, but there are folks that would be perfectly happy to let that ride. Those same folks are out there creating their family trees.
Jebediah Smith married Hermoine Jones in 1865.
Jebediah Smith was born in 1775. Yeah, probably NOT the same Jebediah.