Reply to Recently discovered some of my family came on the Mayflower; anyone else?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Okay, this thread went far afield, but can anyone recommend a legitimate geneologacy service? Is Ancestry.com any good?  We are looking to identify some lineage for descendant rights, so hoping to be a good starting point to see if we should do a formal documented search.[/quote]

Ancestry can be great for accessing Census, immigration, and other records. 
[b]
A lot of the information that comes up on their searches, though, will be from family trees other users have entered. That information is only as good as the research those users did, so proceed with caution. [/b]

There are an awful lot of people out there whose idea of research is to find two people with the same last name living in the same area and assume they must be related, with no documentation. Late 19th and early 20th century family genealogies are also frequently riddled with errors. [/quote]

This. It is unbelievable how many people make an assumption without documentation, and then other people use the bad information, and then it is really hard to convince anyone that there is a mistake because "the found it on Ancestry." Only consider the information valid as far back as it can be documented--and its really hard to document people before 1800 or between 1800 and 1900 if they lived in territories before they became states. Not impossible, but much harder to do without going into source documents in state capitols and in churches (if you can get access). 
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