Ancestry

1, I spent a lot of time finding photos for most of my relatives, especially my siblings. Yesterday I found that all the photos had disappeared.
2.In my father's profile, it lists all of his siblings. Then it lists them again, but now they are half siblings. Why?
3. I took the DNA test and it said I was 5% Scandinavian, My paternal grandmother and at least 3 generations before her came from the Danish Island of Bornholm. This was backed up with church records. That should put me to at least 25% Scandinavian
4. I just looked now and over a half of my family tree has disappeared.
What's going on?.

It is not inexpensive to join or maintain your membership, I did it for over two years and found that information isn't great unless you invest in research and that means real research off site
There are plenty of flaws, misunderstandings and rude people along the way, there is also the hopeful and desperate to find their family and where they belong. So here is the rub, when you no longer belong to ancestry they do not tell your DNA matches, they send emails of members to you but you cannot help them, cannot say I am no longer with ancestry. Its very unfair to the person who sends their message to a second cousin they have found but that person doesn't answer because they cannot. Nor will ancestry even attempt to resolve the misunderstanding by telling that person your no longer there. Its sadly a poor business decision, unkind to the humans involved. I think its money not the families finding each other that drives this site, they have lost their mission.

I did the DNA kit for me and a gift for my mom. It was neat at first to see the percentages of where in the world you come from, but I'm not confident in how accurate it is. For instance, I am certain there is native american in my family but not 1% of that showed up. Same with a friend of mine. It's all made up of the same couple countries. For $100 I wish I could totally count on the accuracy.

I received plenty of info but within a year price went from$16.80 to $19 something to $21, I wasn't using it enough to justify price and cancelled. They charged a $25 cancellation fee! I'm sure it is in the fine print you never read. Anyhow, just expect this if you cancel. I don't agree with it. Bad business & won't go back.

I do like Ancestry. Yet it has its problems. I can only look at the information I have downloaded to my own tree if I have a subscription. Yes I could download everything and reupload but that would be time consuming and why should I. The DNA is severely lacking in tools. Large database but very poor ways of checking how you match. So 5 stars for the records. Minus one star for the subscription only tree info and minus one star for the DNA lack of tools. Really it's only saving grace are the great records and amount of other people's trees. Please sort yourselves out Ancestry or I will be an ex subscriber.

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!

It does have loads of records, but DO NOT use hints from other peoples trees. They are generally incorrect. Do your own research from the available records. I did the DNA test as did my brother, who also uses the site. Amazingly, he was NOT listed as a relative when the results came in although he also did the DNA test! We are twins! I had my DNA done by a different lab, as well as ancestry, and the results were totally different! I have no idea who to believe, although the other lab also does DNA for court trials, so I think they probably have the best equipment. It's an OK site, but be careful. I think everyone is related to Catherine the Great, King Arthur and the Queen of Sheba... according to this site!:-)

This company is great if you want to create and 'view' your family tree. But beware that you CANNOT print the tree for yourself. You must send your information to another company (sponsored by ancestry) to compose posters, book, etc. for a nominal fee. Very disappointed.

Ancestry used to be great to use - now part of it is down almost every day and sometimes it is slower than slow! I wish they could bring their quality back. I'm still happy with the quality of the content - once you can get to it.

Ancestry is a good site for info. However, once you start your tre and then stop paying their fees, you will have access to your tree, but will not be able to view any ancestry documents you down loaded into your tree unless you pay for the subscription again. This is bad. Ancestry should allow you to remain as full access to any document that was downloaded into your tree when you paid the fees. Look for a different site that will allow this.

Sent in adopted husbands DNA & found mothers side & possibly fathers. Contacted Ancestry to confirm if a DNA match could possibly be a half sibling. Sent text & they replied at 1AM with 4 texts while I was trying to sleep. I called & was told that information was not precious. I asked where she was & she said in Columbia. I said no wonder we can't understand each other as her reply didn't make sense to me.

I'm just not convinced that all information leads to the answers one is looking for. My uncle and I searched high and low for info leading to my grandpa's side of the family. Not convinced that what we found is correct. But I think we are giving it up because we have searched long enough and still have nothing

I stay with Ancestry only because of its massive data base of documents. As for its site, I have found and heard from others, that since the take over by Blackstone it has become more glitchy with regular IT issues. As for the Help Line, they might help with very basic issues but be prepared to spend a half hour or more with the associate. I would give them a 10/10 for their document library, 6/10 for their site reliability and 5/10 for the Help line.

I did the DNA test 2 years ago and started tracking matches to make sense. I'm adopted and I thought this would help. They just redid the test and things are a mess. I do a surname search and not all matches show up. Kind of getting hard to trust them.

Been a member for a long time and enjoy it when I find new things about my roots. Since I
Resubscribed this time I am having a hard time getting it to work properly. I try to look things up and it wants to redirect me to I do not know what! Then a screen comes up telling me how to start a tree! I do not need that but it takes many tries before it will let me search.
My internet is not very fast so I usually get frustrated and shut it down.
Does anyone else have this problem
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I initially thought this would be a very good site to begin investigating my family tree when I used the free access, but decided I wouldn't really pay to join until I retired and could spend more time. It still may be very good. I have second thoughts, though, after reading in a review for Archives.com that Ancestry.com is related to it. Archives.com sent me a message that I was subscribed to it and that $39.95 would be automatically be deducted from my credit card account unless I cancelled. I have never used Archives.com, which has a bad ethical and service reputation. I suspect Ancestry.com may have enabled Archives.com to go on a phishing expedition to me. I'll be checking my account.

I did the intro price and decided to get the DNA kit to see what my ethnicity mix was as Im adopted. Also I would have my DNA coding for searching for my mother. I have been charged after canceling and there is no way to call a person. I have printed my cancelation again, and am going to have to change the number on my credit card to stop the 249.00 charge every six months.

I have never had a paid subscription as the fees are way too much for ordinary people to afford. I also bought DNA kits for my husband, mother and one son who bought one for me. I was able to see the inheritance of MY DNA seeing what was inherited from each of my parents (only one living). Today I got into my account to see my deceased parents DNA that I inherited and it is now gone! It says you need to buy a subscription to see it! I and my son paid lots of money for all these DNA kits to be able to see DNA results! Yes I get to see my DNA origins but why was something I was getting for taking the DNA test taken away from me only to say I can no longer see it unless I pay more money?! I'm furious! What kind of scam are they running? I'm very angry and disgusted, like they don't already have people's family info cornered, they make you pay to see or know it, they must make hundreds of billions of dollars off of people! Ancestry you should be ASHAMED!

I know my family history and can yet my DNA results could be for someone else it is so different. First agent said that I must be adopted! I believe the DNA results are simply a compilation of other family members that have Ancestry accounts and requested DNA. No other logical reason since I was not adopted

I would have given this site a five star rating IF it delivered as promised when you sign up. Don't get me wrong... I use ancestry.com a lot, found a sibling and many cousins through Ancestry.com. That said, the site has software glitches that it cannot repair.

Since September 2013 Ancestry.com has failed to deliver invitations to join my family tree (I sent them to family members) and failed to deliver email notifications of data updates to those who are already members. I have called, written and even posted on their Facebook page to no avail. They know of the problem BUT cannot tell me when the problems will be fixed.

ANcestry.com charges a lot of money for full access to their site and data. I do think this is the most comprehensive genealogy site available but not the best, by any means. Plus... the DNA test is a rip-off. All you get back are "possible" matches of third, fourth, fifth, etc. etc. Cousins. None of them have been real for me.

So, if you choose to go with Ancestry.com I recommend you sign up for the least expensive option. Or, try another site until they can get their glitches repaired and working again.

I've had a lot of problems since signing up for a subscription, but nothing like what others have experienced. I did the Free 2-week Trial, but called about half way through to see if they had any promotional offers. I was told there was going to be a special offer Memorial Day Weekend for 1-month of All Access for $31, and all I had to do was wait for the email. Well, an email never came so the day I was told the offer would expire I called. One of the few times I got someone who was actually nice, and helpful. It turned out the offer was actually 6-months of All Access for $99, and a better deal! So I told the woman to sign me up. It wasn't until my free trial was cancelled that it was discovered I didn't qualify, and the remaining time on my trial couldn't be added back. So I asked if a supervisor could put the offer through since I had been told I qualified, and before I knew it a supervisor did just that.

Unfortunately, from that day forward I experienced constant website issues. At that time ThruLines hadn't worked since day one, and my tree met all requirements. But everyday was a new problem which they of course started blaming my computer, browser and/or internet. I admit I got nasty with them on more than one occasion because I was fed up with their lies, and making excuses. Things now seem to be in working order, at least for the moment. I was given a total of 7-months additional All Access to make up for the hassles, and the half of my subscription which was wasted due to their website issues.

In the end they are a company you have to stay on top of constantly, and more often than not you will have to argue with them. I know at least half the people I talked to didn't even have basic knowledge of how the website worked, and definitely should not have been hired for their positions.

I purchased the Family Tree Maker Program 1 when it first came out. Did what I could with it, then when Ancestry linked to FTM I bought it and have had it since, the full World Subscription. Have had a lot of success until 6 1/2 months ago. In trying to research a certain family connection, I ended up with over ******* people in my "tree" and the program started to work funny. Contacted Ancestry. The nice Man/Rep said I had problems because the program was not set up for that vast a number of people. Suggestions: I had 2 trees going, All My Family & Searching for Adam and Eve. Searching etc was the large collection. He suggested that I create a new tree, Searching for Adam and Eve, move over only the people I wanted to keep and then he helped me "delete" the Big Searching etc & All My family. Since that time I started to get hints/leaves on more than 50% of my people. When activating the hint it referred to my one or two Old trees, ie Searching etc and/or All My Family, sometimes one sometimes both. The message I got was that the tree was not available... please recheck later. So that continued until Jan. I called Ancestry many times, and never could get help. Just try this try that, which had already been done, then "I'm emailing you a link for you to try." Nothing ever changed until Jan 2014. I continued to get the same hints, but now they did not reference my old trees, they just said this tree is not available... try again later. Calls since then have been wasted. I keep getting told that things would change with the next update. Spent 2 hours with s lady 2 weeks ago, she said it was my computer. That cannot be, because I have a "cousin" that shares much of the same family with me. We can go thru her leaves and they are the same as mine with the same message, which she too has been getting since October. I even put a complaint on Facebook, I got a reply to contact them thru FB message, not on the home page. I did this and have "chatted" back and forth several times, no help, then they just started ignoring me. Last info I got form that was that they did an update late March... nothing has changed. Again I have to say, I have been paying the $300 something for the World Subscription for several years. You would think someone there would think I am worth something. I want to add that I spoke to one man for over an hour, he said he would have a programmer call me, right that never happened. Folks I talk to at ancestry keep saying they are not seeing the leaves I see. I went thru all my people with last name of A, I have 220 names, 60 of them had the bad hint. On the "B" people I have 493 and 227 have the bad hints. I have explained this to them, and have gotten not response other then that they have so many files that it takes time to update, be patient. Don't you thaink 6 1/2 months is patient enough?

One can make one's own tree, without interference, but there are many places and ways to do that. What about that advantage of gleaning info from other Ancestry trees? Sadly, from the perspective of a careful researcher, many, if not most, of the family trees at ancestry have terrible flaws that then proliferate when other researchers grab tree info without verifying it. For example, at the behest of a cousin, I looked through overseas records (not available at ancestry) for his great-grandfather's record. I did locate it, based on an perfectly matching birth date and birth village in a newly available US record and a Czech record. Unfortunately, some one with a similar family at ancestry had tracked a person with the same name and the same birth year in Czechia back generations. Over 40 persons at ancestry copied all that info to their own family tree, making it seem a certainly. The problem: the birth record for that "same named" putative ancestor had an annotation on it that he died in infancy. There was also a detailed and official death record for that infant. One of my cousins had even visited that birthplace as a consequence-but it was, of course, not the village where his great grandfather was born.

This is just one example. I personally know dozens, if not hundreds. So all those other trees available for your inspection are not necessarily much of a resource. You need to be cautious and view sources in other trees thoughtfully if not critically, or your own tree may become a fairy tale, to put it mildly. Just because "bare info" with a name and a date has been entered into dozens of trees does not mean it is correct. Part of the reason I started genealogical research was due to multiple records online about myself that had my parents wrong, with no sources to inspect.

Another increasing flaw with ancestry is that, more and more, it offers indexes of records with nothing more, as opposed to indexes of records linked to an image of the original (but often not the right image.) If your surname is not as easy as "Smith", you may not be able to check if the record could belong to your ancestor if there's no original to view. And you'll have the same problem if the supposed link to the actual image doesn't link to it. Between those two problems, it took me 5 years of off and on searching to find my great grandparent's immigration record. It was poorly indexed, and pages away from the image to which it was linked.

Another very recent and more troubling development: ancestry has made it impossible to copy writing in the "facts" section. There was no advance warning given. So if you have written text in there, with perhaps a URL in it, you cannot quickly copy it for your own records. That for me is a final straw; I do a fair amount of translating from Czech into English and don't relish either having to translate records again or having to copy my own translations.

Worse yet, that now makes me fear "what" ancestry.com could change next. Will it also become impossible to retrieve records and photographs I personally added to their website, even if I do carry a subscription? So ancestry is now the "last place" I will go to enter info, as I'd better store it elsewhere to be sure of recovering it. It's not a bad place to visit to look around for new info before verifying it, but I wouldn't want to park my genealogical records there.