The sucky thing about Ancestry.com

[chocolatepot]

is that once you get to a certain point - before 1850, I'd say - it's extremely difficult to find useful records. The 1840 census lists the head of house and then numbers of who's there - for instance Hiram Merithew, 1 man 20-29, 1 woman 20-29, 2 women 40-49. Know that he was married by then, I can assume the younger woman is his wife, Lucy, but who the older women are is left completely up to guesswork. So before 1850, you're really at the mercy of everyone who's filled out their own trees. Which you hope they've done through good research, but it's hard to trust them when you find:

- three different fathers for one woman

and

- a strangely noble lineage for an early colonist, and then later on (after you've filled in quite a lot of it) a forum post saying, "dudes, there's no evidence this guy was descended from that guy, they just have the same last name."

It just gets irritating, you look at your tree and wonder how much of it is actually right. :(