Are family tree websites actually reliable enough to trace back my lineage?
That depends on what you mean by “family tree websites”. If you mean that literally – that is, the sites where individuals share their research in the form of family trees (people, data about them, and relationships by generation)? Then they could and should NOT be taken as 100% reliable. They should be taken as CLUES or even as ways to meet up with others researching the same lines you are. But the accuracy of what you find is only as good as the research methods (and documented sources to back up each bit of data in the trees). Research quality varies widely!! So take good care and NEVER download and merge online family tree data INTO your data. Else, you’ll wind up with a useless huge tangle of names and info – with no way to say where you got what information or how to answer “how do you know that” for any given event, person’s name, event, place, time, relationship, etc. If you meant “family tree” as in genealogy website, then that’s bigger than a bread box as there are MANY diffe
