We used to learn about our ancestry/heritage by listening to our parents and grandparents telling family stories.
My grandparents were all dead by the time I was born in 1947. My father was born in Holland and came here as a little boy in 1912. My mother was born in Canada in 1920, and came here as a little girl with her only brother, and their mother. There was no family history past the names of my grandparents. My father didn't even know where his own mother was buried as she'd died not long after they arrived here. I didn't find that info out until my brother died in 1995, when a cousin got in touch.
Many years ago I hired a researcher in Holland to search back 6 or 7 generations. He only provided me with great-grandparents, and even then, a lot was missing. When my mother died in 1990, I traveled to Canada to research her side of the family, but there is still a lot of missing info, like what happened to my grandmother's sister? She's not buried next to her husband in who died in the early thirties and is buried in a double plot. She disappeared from the Covington, Kentucky City Directory in the early 50's, and can't be traced. And there is no information on my mother's father who was supposedly a lumberjack in Tweed, Ontario Canada. I have their marriage info, but no death date, and no burial site. I can't even get any WWII service records for my mother's brother, because his records were destroyed in the big fire at the military records center in St. Louis, in 1973.
I'm the last one left of my family. If I hadn't had my DNA tested through Ancestry.com, I never would have known that besides DNA from England and Northwester Europe, I have DNA from Sweden, Denmark, Germanic Empire, Ireland and Scotland. My parents never knew any of that.
And based on what I've learned from family who use ancestry sites with actual historic records, and those who have done dna tests, many of those stories are flat-out wrong.
Because a lot of people want to look at old census records and find family that way to have a complete family tree. I guess I will not be renewing my subscription now. Don’t trust Blackstone