Martin L.

Ancestry.com is one of the most useful genealogy paysites. I have the full membership which gives me access to every record they have. Since I am based in Europe, the annual charge is 199 Euro, which is a bit pricey. They do not have nearly as many original records for European countries as they have for the US, though. As a European, Ancestry.com will be most useful if you have American relatives and you want to research the branches of your family tree on the other side of the Atlantic. I would estimate that on average, I am able to find about 5-10 original records for every American in my family tree (depending of course on how long a person lived). Ancestry.com add tons of data every month, so the site is worth re-visiting over and over. Lately, they added city directories for most of the places I am interested in.

The interface to view original record images has been "updated" recently. Not a good idea, since it uses flash and crashes quite regularly on Firefox. You can still choose the older interface under the "Options" tab, which will perfectly do the job.

The search interface could be more sophisticated, but it allows for wildcards (not a given on many other sites). If you complain about too many irrelevant search results, simply use "exact" search or give more detailed information on the person you are looking for.

One con I would mention is the questionable quality of many user-submitted family trees. But you cannot really blame Ancestry.com for being so popular that they attract a lot of - let's say, not very diligent "researchers". The problem with the global village are the village idiots, as they say...

Their 7 day free trial is simply a scheme to get your credit card number. They will charge you immediately anyways. The matches they provide on any search ("We found x vital records on y") turn out to be mostly links to other paysites or links to freely available information. I was lucky enough to use PayPal for the free trial registration (which I was unable to cancel with Archives.com), because I could just file a complaint with PayPal and they agreed it was a scam. Archives.com seems to pay some third party bloggers to refute the scam claim - do not fall for that, either. Archives.com has always been a scam, and needs to be shut down.