Hello, Charlotte, and welcome to WikiTree. I was and am a paid subscriber to ancestry.com, and I will continue to be. DeBee is correct in that many, if not most of the family trees there have serious mistakes in them. Most have unsourced data, and for that reason should be taken as hints, and it is necessary to search for sources for those data points. For example, it can often be used to identify parents, spouses, children, even if the dates are incorrect. You can then do searches in other databases to find dates and other data to confirm the sources. Ancestry is divided into two parts: the less than reliable family trees, and then the huge repository of data which can often be relied on as sources. But you must also read the description of each data base. Often the "source" is a collection of LDS and/or ancestry family trees, in which case they cannot be relied on as sources. Best sources are town records, censuses, church records, and so on. Also beware of those; spelling of names is often incorrect, dates may be erroneous, and so on. I have found the same person with incorrect given names, and surname spelled 3 different ways in 3 censuses because the enumerator could not hear or spell or both. Books of family genealogies, many from the mid to late 1800s, can be good sources, also, if they themselves contain sources.
