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So, I have used this site almost from the beginning and from an "access to records" it is fantastic. So, for searching out information on people born after 1800 it works very well. The ability to attach these records as basis help as you are building your tree.
My major complaint is the lack of validation of data in family trees. There are very few trees on Ancestry.com that are "factual", i.e. based on records and valid sources. I would never use another tree on Ancestry.com to build my family tree. The biggest issue is where someone makes a mistake, or takes a leap of faith and then hundreds of people copy it, and it becomes "truth". Literally, there are so many cases of children born after parents died, child born when mother is under 10 years old, people with 27 children, etc. I just ignore all those trees. There are cases where people have documentation that looks like a good source for the person in the tree, but, when you validate, or look at the source, it actually has nothing to do with the person they have attached the record to. I would love to recommend Ancestry.com, but it has become very expensive for just looking up records.
Finally, if you had asked me to recommend Ancestry.com a few years ago, I would have said an emphatic "yes", but I believe it has now become a site of so much bad data in the trees on line, and so many people use those trees as fact, that I no longer believe that this is a good site for the amateur genealogist.
In summary, I would not recommend Ancestry.com to a friend.
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