AncestryReviews 636

Waste of time, ridiculous incorrect database, info is wild west database added and changed by everyone who thinks they need to ad their Family tree to a website, incorrectly linking and misspelling themselves and then linking themselves to royal families. I tried it for a year, invested time to enter our family tree, tried to make it public, so anyone can see it, but the tree never was found by any search method, being logged in or logged out. It is impossible to ad titles in any shape or form, nevertheless they brag about being linked to historical databases, usually filled with only royal names... only!. For in the past only the wealthy people, usually blue blooded could afford to read and write and leave historical documents behind anyway. It is not fully PC nor Mac nor ipad nor iphone nor Android compatible really, there is always a glitch which makes one stop being able to use it. Always when one wants to ad info or correct info in the tree, thats when it happens that software glitch... Inviting family members to a tree never worked at all, the other party could never manage to follow the many steps to eventually access the tree. These Coders (that the guys who do the programming) should be all replaced with people who actually know what they are doing. At the end of the day, i have a tree there, which only myself can look at properly on my computer at home, none of my family members could ever access it from their computers at their homes, and add info and make the tree bigger. When i searched for more Ancestors, i ended up not finding accurate information, but was inundated with names which were incorrectly written up, birth and death dates were false, locations were false, one had to guess this must be one ancestor, but it turned out someone in nowhere country made this data up,... so forget finding your ancestors on this website, you will only find Junk info from illiterate people out there, and the historical databases the claim they have, are freely accessible only if you go there directly, but ancestry will charge you an arm and a leg for info coming from those libraries, if you want to access that info from within the ancestry website, info which turns out to be false almost 10 out of 10 times, when using ancestry.com website searches. Support is incompetent and never even speak your language... i wonder where they get money from, they should have gone bankrupt a long time ago... looking at that track record of the site and what it claims to be able to do, but it fails to do at the end of the day

I got hooked when I signed up for the DNA. Suddenly, I found that I have absolutely no Scottish heritage but rather Irish. Now, I know for a fact that my mother's side comes directly from Scotland and goes back hundreds of years! I fell for Ancestry.com and signed up for the basic, but could not get anything from Scotland/England, so signed up for that also. Well, as someone said in their comments, even though you give exact information, you get over hundreds of people that do not have anything to do with the exact information. So, after about three months, I canceled. That was okay. No problem with that. BUT! I paid for my DNA and I paid for the information on my family and now that I have canceled I cannot access any of this information. If I paid for this information, I should be able to access it. I don't expect to get new information, with computers today, I can be locked out of searches, but I SHOULD BE ABLE TO SEE THE INFORMATION THAT I DID PAY FOR!

After signing up as a guest all of a sudden 13 months later I see a $108 charge to my Paypal account! I never even FINISHED filling out the trial membership page! Over the 13 months they kept sending me "You forgot to finish your subscription request!" I guess finally they just decided to go ahead and bill me with what information they had already gathered! When I tried to complain, I got an automatic email reply saying they're updating their site and could I go fill out another form... which I did and proceeded to get the same email AGAIN asking me to go fill out the same form. When I called I never got through to a live person. AWFUL SERVICE!

The Ancestry.com website is so SLOW, and yes it is their website because I can navigate quite quickly on any other website. I keep getting a message often that due to heavy traffic try again later. WELL... I need access my family tree NOW. Not later... It is very frustrating, I will NOT be renewing. And you all need to remember that you have to actually cancel your subscription before the term date whether it be the end of the two weeks free trail or if you renewed because if you do not actually cancel they WILL continue to take money from your account until you do. They also, need to update their servers to handle the traffic volume or get out 0f the business of CUSTOMER SERVICE cause they now are actually NO CUSTOMER SERVICE.

I've been using Ancestry for a couple of months now. I have found numerous errors in the data, which I've flagged with them. They ask for your e-mail address when flagging errors but I haven't received a single response.

I can find records on "free" sites but not on Ancestry. I've queried this with them and they say that they don't have "all" records.

When you tick the "exact" box, you still get a mixture of records, so what's the point in that!

On a positive note, I have found a lot of information and the public family trees have been really useful, but you can't believe everything you see. I've found lots of inaccurate information!

In a separate review done earlier, I commented about Ancestry in general, since they moved to 'New' Ancestry. I will make one general comment now, that 'New' Ancestry continues to have lots of problems. It is a poor substitute to the product that was in place till last December.

Up to today I haven't have the technical difficulties others have had. But today I had a serious issue. I tried to use the online function to submit a Help request. Guess what: the online support submission form error'ed out twice, would not go through.

Reluctantly I called the customer support number. 22 minutes waiting, all the time listening to their commercials. Finally got the operator, who was pleasant enough, no use complaining a lot to her, she doesn't run the (pitiful) company. She though could not resolve my problem, a ticket had to be submitted to the developers. Who knows when my problem will be fixed. She did though get in a personal commercial seeing that my renewal was coming up, about how I could take advantage of other Ancestry offerings. The one I have has problems, and they want be to bite off more...

Ancestry does have great libraries of information. Never lose track though that they are a MARKETING COMPANY, selling stuff. Don't pay a lot of attention to the slick TV shows or the commercials, Ancestry doesn't care squat about you the customer and your family history. You are $$$ only to them.

UPDATE 6/22/2016

Customer Support is non-existent. If one sends an email to their Support email address, auto reply is provided with directions to fill ou an online form. IT DOESN'T WORK! Try calling their Support about a tree technical issue, get put on hold for up to 20 to 25 minutes, and then get an operator who doesn't know squat except to say that the problem will be submitted to the developers for investigation. AND THEN NOTHING WILL EVER HAPPEN, YOUR PROBLEM WILL NOT GET FIXED. Watch their TV show, watch their advertizing BUT DO NO BUY THEIR PRODUCTS!

What a disappointment! I loved Ancestry now it is so cumbersome and slow that I can't wait to store my information on my computer and be done with this program. Ancestry is discontinuing their Family Tree program so it will no longer interface with Ancestry, ( this way you have no choice but to belong to Ancestry)so everything that I want to save I will have to go in and save individually. They took a really good program and completely ruined it!

I started dabbling a few years ago, and Ancestry.com provided a decent amount of info for the United States, including newspaper articles. Now, it is just awful. About 2 week ago, I thought I would start up again, and I am extremely disappointed! Everything I had saved to my family tree was gone was gone, and you can't get it back! Plus you now have to pay for newspaper articles, etc., which was formerly included. In a nutshell, you pay more and get less! I'm going to look elsewhere. This is a huge rip off!

Greetings: I am heartsick. I have been building my tree and my husbands in Ancestry.com for years, and have done the DNA as well. Last week, I noted that I was unable to see most of the hundred or so relatives in my husband's tree. It turns out it is gone. The very poor customer service agent "was sorry to inform me" that all of that work is irretrievably lost. She also could have "cared less". I am cancelling my subscription and I will find a more sound way to collect and store that valuable data. If you are using this site, beware!