Ancestry

The site is not easy to use. They trick you into spending money and charge cancellation fees. Don't buy!

Rude customer service agent. Do not recommend. Expensive for what you get. Not worth the money. Dissatisfied.

They charged my credit card after I had cancelled. When I called to dispute the charge they made it very difficult to eventually approve a refund.

Overprice and useless. The membership automatically gets renewed each month. You pay to do your own work. Be aware and save yourself tome/money.

Beware of Acestry.com - they are only interested in you parting with your cash - Try to unsubscribe - it's a journey to hell!

This troubles me. I have been a steady member of Ancestry since 2009. I have since quit my full year subscription because of misleading advertisements. They treat you like a horse where they dangle the carrot just out of reach so that you can buy another product from them. Case in point is after you join you will get an email saying there are clues or "hints". When you clik their hints link it brings you to their join ancestry page and the link stops there. This happens every time.
I have over combined 3000 people in 5 different trees there. I am presently downloading them in a GEDCOM form to up load to another program.
SO... I get a "special " price on Ancestry "All Access" which includes Newspapers.com and Fold3. I didnt find out until after I ordered the 6mos subscription that it was only a "basic" membership to these and that you had to ad another 30.00 to access that. I had Newspapers.com years ago and let me assure you... they are useless too. Fast forward from ancestryto present day and I get a notice that there is a DNA match... How can there be a match when I never submitted a DNA sample?
BUYER BEWARE! They are all full of hidden charges you dont get to see until you join just once. Their customer service SUCKS! Should be able to clear things up with a simple email but they want you to hang on hold for 2 hrs hoping you will forget what you called for

Takes forever to get results back ridculous it is no longer exciting for me to know where i came from

The cost is outrageous! Good heavens! With the $300 they ask for every 6 months for full access a whopping $600 a YEAR, I can save that money and fly to England AND GET THE RECORDS MYSELF!

There are a lot of problems with ancestry.com. 1.) you are paying for information that is free elsewhere, birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, & census information. A few sites have allowed ancestry.com free access to their information, but do not allow them to charge the public for the information, find-a-grave is one such sight. 2.) it is not uncommon to come across many family trees that contain conflicting information, such as death dates, or birth dates, some trees won't have dates at all, other use terms like about, or after in front of dates. You just cannot be sure the information is accurate, so you have to weed through the garbage much like a detective to determine what is correct and what is not. 3.) the search functions stink, they pull up to many results that just do not match the search, and no matter how you try to limit or add information to a search the results are much the same. Because of this there is way to much information to review and 99% of it is useless, and a waste of time, when you are looking at thousands of results you like me will just give up after about 5 or 6 pages of results. 4.) what really gets me mad about ancestry.com is that once you decide your tree is complete, or you no longer want to use the site... you cancel the "membership". But be fore warned. All those birth certificates, death certificates, census reports etc, that you searched for are no longer available to you. That's correct you paid for the information, but cancel the membership and you can't review it again. So if your smart you will print out copies of all the official documents that you found to verify information In your tree. Keep it in a separate file, because you will want to review the information again, without having to pay for it again. 4) finally, make sure your tree is set to private, this way no one can steal your pictures, or stories, I made the mistake of not setting the tree to private and many of my pictures are now on other trees. When I asked them to delete my pictures they tell me screw off, they paid for them...

The information they supply is very generic, any of their "extra services "are tricks to scam more money and very difficult to cancel

Very basic information on your gene. And IMPOSSIBLE TO LOG IN... HAVE TO CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD EACH TIMES. DO NOT WAIST YOUR MONEY AND TIME WITH THOSE SNAKE OIL SELLERS. STAY AWAY,

I signed up for a free trial and received no notification of a $259 renewal months later! No refund!

They have a chatbot that does not work and zero support. I have a simple issue with an lost dna test kit but cannot get a hold of someone to discuss.

Garbage. Pay for what? DNA... ok fine. Look, I'm 42% whatever; who the hell is my Fathers Mother? Nothing? WTF did I just pay for?

I have been a Worldwide member of Ancestry since 2007. I recently attempted to get a DNA test for my 90 year old mother. As is the case with many 90 year-old people, Mom is not computer literate. Therefore, I thought I could just manage her DNA test for her. I would send her the test, she would take it and mail it in and I would do the computer stuff. Unfortunately, Ancestry requires that every person taking a DNA test have an email and an Ancestry account. I could not use Mom's information with my account. I don't want to other accounts in Mom's name and explaining all of this to her would just make her nervous. I can't be the first person with an elderly relative who is skittish about computers. I don't understand the need for these separate accounts and question the "protection" they afford since they could easily be faked. I don't see how Mom would be more protected by this system. I will say Ancestry is refunding my money, but this was disappointing and really a hassle. This was supposed to be fun. It wasn't.

Furthermore, Ancestry currently seems more interested in getting people to take DNA tests than people interested in genealogical research. In fact, Ancestry is flooded with the results of people who have no genealogical research connections to their DNA results. Without this research, all an Ancestry DNA test will give you is a few cultural percentages and probable immigration patterns. It may suggest a few cousins to you, but without additional research you will have no way of knowing how or if you are connected to these people.

BTW-- I've been a Worldwide member of Ancestry since 2007. I wish there was another service I could use besides Ancestry. The direction the company has taken in the past couple of years has not been positive.

I signed up for a free trial and was charged anyway. Customer service was circuitous and completely unhelpful.

I've used ancestry for 5 years. In the past, it was easy to go on-line and cancel my subscription (when I got busy in life and wasn't working on my genealogy). I would then resubscribe and use it again when I had time. Well, I have a 6 month subscription that was scheduled to renew Dec 16 but decided to take a break for a while. Went in to cancel subscription on the website and it literally just took me back to the home page - the website has clearly been changed to not allow users access to the cancellation screen. After hunting around on the website, I found a customer service number. It said press 2 to cancel. I did so. I entered my account info, twice, and the automated voice told me it could not find my account (I was staring at my active account info on their website, so obviously, they have deactivated the ability to cancel by phone. I called back, and pressed 1, the line for people who want to upgrade their subscriptions and got a live human named Veronica. She claims that she cancelled my subscription and gave me a cancellation number. But based on the experience where they made it almost impossible to cancel, and the complaints on people on this board where their credit cards keep getting charged, I am going to also call my credit card company and put a fraud complaint in place so they don't charge my card. UNETHICAL. VERY DISAPPOINTED IN ANCESTRY. You used to be honest and had a good site. NO MORE. WILL NEVER USE YOU AGAIN>

Yes, Ancestry seems expensive and the membership has gradually increased over time. But what do people expect? Their database is massive and growing. It's way better than MyHeritage. I never find much on that site and I've just grown accustomed to Ancestry's layout. I love their throughline guide (not meant to be set in stone), and their hints are helpful (but also not meant to be taken without checking into them on your own). I love that you can build multiple trees (I have many experimental ones to sort out confusion on family lines). I love that you can manage the trees and DNA belonging to your family members. I love that all of the trees and DNA that others share with me are compiled into an easy-to-find and navigate list. I love that no one can change your tree unless you make them manager of it. I love that everything you attach to your tree stays attached, even when you take breaks from paid membership. No, you cannot view those attached things while you are not a paying member, but once you renew your membership, they are all still there and viewable again. This is why you should download them while you are a paid member, save them in your files, and upload them into your tree as photos. Then they will be viewable during unpaid breaks from membership. Ancestry is a huge continuously growing database. New stuff is continuously being added. Their DNA database dominates all autosomal DNA databases thus far (in my opinion). They allow you to upload DNA from other testing companies (which is kind of them). Sure they are a huge corporation that understandably wants to make large sums of money, but based on all of the things they offer that other sites don't, I think it's worth the money. Also, if you remain patient and wait for sales you can save quite a bit. I dapple with other family tree building and research sites, but Ancestry has remained my favorite thus far. Once you learn how to navigate, and what not to do when building and adding to your tree, it is an awesome genealogy tool. When used with sites offering DNA tools (like DNA painter, triangulation, and one-to-many comparison) it's even more beneficial. So yes, they are pricey but to me...they are where I get the most bang for my buck. At least, so far.

I've attempted to cancel for 5 months to no avail. No refund either. I'm over the stealing. I haven't logging in in months.

Got a Free Trial - They billed me 37$ then when I cancelled it (Same Day within minutes) they then billed me 25.00 to cancel it - RIP OFF Predatory Con men - DO NOT USE THEM

Took forever to recieve kit. Instructions were terrible. Service was rotten, no ability to help with issues.

Yes right, I wanted to know if I am Japanese, Korean or Chinese? They told me I'm Asian. I already know that. Don't waste your money!

They took the CC numbers used to pay testing fees and rolled them into a fake monthly plan. Wow! Scary!