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Comment by iav | Hacker News Reader

Minus all of the data though. That’s why people pay for Ancestry, is because they go in to countries around the world and pay to digitize archives and make them available to subscribers. Usually data like the census is made available on a rolling basis so every year there is new data to process and release

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FamilySearch data seems OK to me (idly curious rather than a serious researcher) and LDS (which it is run by) doesn't proselytize on the site, while Ancestry and other commercial services are constantly selling themselves.

I've used https://github.com/Linekio/getmyancestors to export data from FamilySearch and browse in Gramps.

FamilySearch is excellent and has a ton of primary sources once you get used to how to find them. Ancestry.com's main advantage is that it provides "hints" that suggests sources for your ancestors. It's super easy to add those sources and people to your tree. That's also its main weaknesses, because these sources and hints are sometimes completely wrong, and are then copied and repeated by many genealogists until they take on a veneer of truth through sheer repetition.

FamilySearch also provides hints ("research helps") with the same up and downsides. Perhaps this is a recent feature, I've only used the site since early this year.

I feel like there's an opportunity to do automated data quality assessment, and to provide some indication of that in the UI/with the data.

Overall though I'm fairly impressed with the fluidity of the UI and speed of the site, would be curious to know about their backend.

Thanks, I was not aware of this option, I love the idea of self hosted data that I can back up myself and is not dependant on a 3rd party online service or app that could go out of business. Much appreciated.

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