Ancestry.com Sucks
Ancestry.com has an advertising campaign in full swing right now. I’ve seen them on TV and I’ve seen their ads plastered on web sites.
I’m as curious about my roots as the next guy. I decided to take a look.
First I created my “family tree.” They allowed me to enter my name and “start my tree.” What a green friendly web site. Lots of trees and leafs and such.
I then tried to add my spouse. Bingo! The first hurdle. They want me to fill out some form before continuing. Let’s see. It’s a “save tree” function and it only really wants my email address. I think I can live with that. Let’s continue.
I then go to add my father. That seemed to work as well. Here they had some “good news” for me. They had found an “ancestry hint” on my dad. I opened it to take a look.
Yep, that’s my dad alright. They had his birth date and place of birth correct. They also had the correct day he died, although the location was wrong. He didn’t die in the United States. He was in Mexico at the time trying some weirdo funky treatments for cancer at a rip-off medical resort. Ancestry.com said the information about my dad came from “2 public member trees.” Apparently some other Ancestry.com members were the source of their information about my dad.
I tried adding several more members of my tree. I never received another “ancestry hint.”
I then clicked the “review hint” button back on my dad’s record. BINGO! That took me to the Trial Membership page. Of course, I knew all along that this was my eventual destination where they were guiding me. I kept my mind open and continued to look by clicking the “continue” button.
That’s when I landed on this little nugget*:
World Deluxe Membership 14-Day Free Trial
You won’t be billed if you cancel online or call before your free trial ends. Your price after the 14–day free trial is $299.40 for your annual subscription (plus any applicable tax).
Mothafucka!
To get my “free” trial I have to sign up for a $299.40 payment? And, here’s the kicker, you actually think your web site is worth $24.95 a month??? I’ve spent some time on this planet and never in my entire life have a seen a web site ask for that kind of money.
It’s my humble opinion that a free trial shouldn’t require a credit card. Of course, they want that payment to trigger automatically unless you do something to stop it. That’s how they get you.
Sorry, I can’t really afford $24.95 a month and for inaccurate information to boot. If I can find your online axe tool I’ll be chopping down my family tree. Of course, there is probably a charge for that, too. If George Washington was one of my ancestors maybe I can borrow his hatchet? That would make it a family heirloom.
Goodbye expensive tree web site. Eat my ass.
* This was apparently their default offer that I reached by clicking the “continue” button. I logged in later and noticed you can also pay by the month. It’s $29.95 a month for the “World Deluxe Membership” and $19.95 a month for “US Deluxe Membership.” The difference is access to their world database.
The public member trees do have a lot of inaccurate information — but ancestry also has every US census between 1790 and 1930 searchable. (Except 1890, which was destroyed by fire.) They have databases filled with birth, marriage and death records, military records, and more. Many genealogists find it is worth the price, though there is free information out there.
The best free sites for genealogy research in my opinion:
http://www.familysearch.org
http://www.findagrave.com
http://rootsweb.ancestry.com/
http://aad.archives.gov/aad/
John, thansk for your information as well. Hmmm…I was turned off by the idea, and now I might look into these other possibilities!
~Nadia.
I agree with Nadia. Thanks so much for the info, John.
Ancestry.com may be good, but the sticker shock puts it out of reach of the casual user, IMHO. I’m not about to drop the price of an iPod or a PS3 for merely one year of access. I guess it’s intended to be a tool for hard code genealogy buffs.
Thanks for visiting and for the comment!
Uhm….this was fun to read. I love your “kick ass” writing style! You are too funny!
“Eat my ass” themed posts are turning out to be my specialty!
Thanks for the comment and the ongoing support!
I love the humor you insert in your rants! Word to the wise – my sister got trapped by a site like this (that slowly lures you in asking for more and more info) and got annoyed at one point so she put an ex-friend’s email/phone # in for the info. Big oops! It backfired and the ex-friend had charges to her phone that were traced to my sister. And my sister had no idea that would happen – she just thought she might receive unwanted telemarketing stuff to her phone and email inbox.
They suck beyond the bait and switch tactic. A few years ago I subscribed to access newspapers and other old records, and seriously, their database is crap crap crap. They wasted so much of my time, reading fuzzy tiny print to find out that the reference was not what I was searching for, seems if one of the names you’re looking for is common, they tend to ignore middle initials and send you dozens of hopeful, yet ultimately frustratingly useless info. I found more online free myself than I ever did on their suck site and cancelled as soon as I was able. Argh. yep, screw them.
I saw the ad and gave it half a second’s thought. My attitude that relatives are like potatoes – the best ones are underground.
On my side of the family I have a cousin who spends way too much time at cemeteries in far flung places. Luckily, my husband’s family, who is a Mormon (the father, not my husband) just called to let us know they’ve traced his family back to Jesus. I’m awaiting an official certificate.
I was just thinking about you today then you blogged then you visited! Wow! I have such powers.
When I first saw your name in this thread at first I felt guilty. I didn’t want a person as nice as you to be tainted by my evil. Then I read your opening sentence and chuckled. I think it must be ok for you to be here.
I just heard our public library has Ancestry.com for free. I think I said I’d consider paying $20 a year for it, but not $24.95 a month. But for free I’m willing to do a bit of digging. (Pun intended.)
Jesus? Big deal. I can trace my roots all the way to Japeth.
Nifty.
I can trace mine back to my dad. I think. There’s a possibility it could have been the milkman. Damn, stymied at the very first step. At least I know my son is mine. I think.
Ancestry.com is not a very good company. I had been using Family Tree Maker 16 for 3 years and built over 4000 people in the tree with over 1000 photos. Before I could print the “books’ my computer had to be relplaced and “surprise surprise” I had to buy 2010 Family Tree Maker. The Family Tree maker 16 would not work on my new compuiter. So i tried to upload my files and found that over 1/3 of the info did not translate and about 1.2 the pictures. I also found the new version cumbersome and full of “bugs”, meaning computer cliches. When i accessed their update section there were 3 pages of “fixes” they had issued to 2010. I wonder why they did not pretest with an expert useer like myself before selling to the public?
So,,, I wrote the head of Ancestry.com and let him know how disappointed I was in their coimpany (willful disregard for curremt paying members by not issuing appropriate computer patches from one sysem to another etc.) and the cumbersome nature of the new program. Not a response from him. This confirms that the company is being run by money grubbing amateurs who have little regard for the ancestry-searching commiunity and little ability to manage a large company. The program upgrades are not great, the annual fee is expensive so be careful before you invest 3 years like I did.
David Beittel; Palm Srpings, California Beittelpsprings@aol.com
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Free my ass, never got past the first screen….say there was an error….crap-ola!
The “free” service includes error messaging. All other services are apparently “premium.”
Ha, and that error couldn’t POSSIBLY be your fault? (Bad settings, mis managed trusted sites, etc?)
Fuck These Cock Sucking Whores ! I tried to get my trial but somehow they didn’t recognize my street address! You know what they did recognize? My credit card number! All of a sudden it was “oh, you live there? I guess we couldn’t read it without something coming out of your account. There lucky I was desperate to finish a project at the time. after I was finished I cancelled on the same day and low and behold a month later they charge me again! They didn’t send me an email confirmation from the last time! so I couldn’t prove to them that I did in fact cancel the same day! So I ended up spending 44.00 on a site I used once! I’ve spent less on Porn!!!!!!
Aaron, I feel your pain. It’s rather funny to see what works and what doesn’t, eh? Somehow the money-taking part always falls into the “Works” category! What are the odds???
My advice is dispute the hell out of everything they’ve ever charged you.
Studies show that the number one reason companies charge recurring fees for accounts that have been canceled is, “We forgot.”
“There was an unexplainable glitch” was a close second.
Good luck detaching yourself from the good folks over at Ancestry.com.
They all SUCK ASS! This information should be FREE and AVAILABLE to everyone!
You know, that’s not a bad idea. Perhaps there’s an opportunity there for someone to take an “open source” approach, like the Wikipedia model. If enough people used such a system eventually it could grow to be quite a resource.
Run with it, Sonny!
It is free and available to everyone moron. You just have to do a SHIT ton of work to get access to these records and ancestry.com provides a localized service that helps you avoid waiting 2 or 3 months to get a draft card from the dept of defense. If people don’t like the prices, they can just go elsewhere. The amount of bitching about such a simple concept is hilarious to me.
Thanks, Jeff. I like your spunk. Some of us like to treat bitching like a sport. Finally I can say, “I’m an athlete!”
The way you made your point makes me laugh. “The information is free. You just have to get off your ass to get it.” Good one.
I can envision myself having hours of fun playing with a website like Ancestory.com and learning about information that is essentially 100 percent irrelevant to my life. It might be interesting. But with the price of gas and food and a decades-long trend of reduced buying power, I have to be a little stingy when it comes to websites that want something like $25 a month, so I guess it isn’t meant to be. My interest in their service just doesn’t prioritize highly enough to justify that sort of expense.
Yes! It belongs to us anyway. Our history is ours, and our taxes paid for the censuses (censi?!).
Take the power back!
The information doesn’t belong to you. The census was not made nor kept for genealogical purposes. That they release it rather than destroy it is a God send. And you aren’t paying Ancestry for the member trees or any public information, you are paying them for 1. the technology they use to bring it to your computer and 2. the collections they have to pay for such as library collections and birth/death records from countries and states that don’t give that information freely even to the person(s) listed in them. Do you get a copy of your birth certificate free? It’s your information isn’t it?
Sure, when you see the guy on public TV finding celebrities long lost relatives, and all for free mind you.
Sometimes they shed a tear when they find their gg granny. Heck.I would cry too when I realize
I getting it for free. Bottom line is searching the web for this kind of information will cost you. Geneology
and Ancestry are big businesses making million on folks starved for family history. I think is a scam
and went to the FREE records of towns or cities where the info was stored. It was free. They dont
charge you to go to a library, why should you be held up by these peddlers of geneology
Well said, Art. More and more I’m thinking someone who is brilliantly ahead of their time needs to start an open source genealogy web site. I see huge opportunity there!
Yeah coz Wikipedia is known for accuracy. There are several open source sites that give you free documents ONLY if they are publicly available. They can’t give you for free anything that the holder of the original document requires a payment system for transfer of copyright. Geni, Genforum, MyHeritage, Ancestory, even FamilySearch all offer free options that aren’t at all hard to get at. Each one has a tree sharing service. Each one provides you with several free options, you just can’t get everything that is available online (heck, even Ancestry doesn’t have *everything*) and 90% of what is available for family history isn’t online at all…. Your article, comments and replies are all very ill-informed and utterly useless. You didn’t try their service, you stopped before you really gave it a fair shake so you could make this article. Every website that has a free trial requires a credit card for identification and auto bill pay…. not new. I’ve seen many websites at $30 a month for a variety of services, so even your jab about that cost being prohibitive is senseless. Ancestry’s yearly subscription is less than $1 a day and holds the largest online database of records not found on any free site (and many pay sites don’t have what Ancestry has free or otherwise). I realise the economy is bad, but it’s called a budget. You chose not to use the money for Ancestry, fine. I choose to skip cable bills since I’m not watching TV anyway….
Hi Anarhi, thanks for the comment. I respect your point of view. And I don’t have cable, either.
I’m not sure who “owns” my genealogical information. Can it be copyrighted? What if someone built a website that allowed me to say, “I am me and so-and-so was my mom and so-and-so was my dad. And their parents were XYZ, etc.” What if that website was open source. And what if it allowed everyone to punch in their data or the data on other people they know. Who owns the information?
I think it would be cool to see an “open” website like that.
Why are we always so hung up on “owning” every little thing?
By the way, I did try the service, I just never paid for it. And, like I said, I was less than impressed. You may be a fan and/or affiliated with the company, but I have a different opinion. Vive la difference!
Less than a dollar a day means less than $365 a year and, to me, that’s a freakin’ lot of dough. That makes it one of the most expensive online services I’ve ever seen. My genealogical information just isn’t worth that much to me. Maybe for others it is and that’s fine. It’s all just another free market win-win.
Thanks, again!
I hadn’t come back to this in a while and just wanted to point out that the free information sharing that you wish to have is a part of Ancestry.com via their free to view trees (also found on their other site Mundia.com- both requiring only a user name to view the trees).
As for Roderick’s comment below: they don’t steal information, they buy it. They buy it from those who require payment (governments, libraries, historical societies, lifetime genealogists…..). The records aren’t bogus, the trees usually are. And I reply here because this ties into what you, shoutabyss, are wanting: free information sharing. Those trees and mailing lists that have always been free on any genealogy site have the highest rate of misinformation. The ability to view records (the facts) from your home is what Ancestry requires payment for. The do have several hundred free databases of public information, but the private information collected from private entities or under government contract requires payment (Scotland, for example, requires you use their own pay per view website save for a very small amount they share with Ancestry as part of the paid service).
And as for cost, I just read that the January estimate was 82 million people worldwide spending anywhere from $1000 to $18,000 to research their genealogy. As for myself, I am a professional genealogist unaffiliated with Ancestry, but very thankful for what they provide as it has increased my research areas. Without it I would be stuck doing research in a slower, more concentrated circle of geographic areas and wouldn’t be able to help my customers as much as I have. I do use 5 websites daily (including the free FamilySearch) and a handful of others during a month to supplement what isn’t readily gathered in one place. I do wish you’d give them another chance as I sincerely believe that you and your readers are missing the point of the free trial and without using that trial you never really saw the site.
Hi again, Ana! I appreciate your input. Of the information I saw on Ancestry.com, my dad’s info was incorrect. Since I only saw a handful of people, that’s a pretty high error rate. Maybe I’m just lucky. Like always.
I still think an open source genealogy site would be a great idea (if it doesn’t already exist).
I’m not saying Ancestry.com has no value. I just think the price is high. And I don’t like forking over my credit card for “free” trials. And I know they didn’t invent that schtick.
Just for you I might go back and look again. At least I can find out if they straightened out my dad’s info. And it could give me a chance to do a follow-up review. I believe this very post is currently the #1 result in Google for the phrases “ancestry sucks” and “ancestry.com sucks.” It’s great to be at the top of tree!
I could not agree more. They are the Carnegie’s and Rocketfellers of the present day. I would not thrust them with anything. Most of the info on their site is bogus. In 2012 most people with a brain know they are the worst. MOst of the info that is legit was stolen from the hard work of genealogists around the world. Ancestry.com can bite me.
Those are strong opinions, Roderick. Did you give them a try? If so, what was your experience? Thanks for the comment!
Without a doubt they are the Carnegie/Roketfeller/Vanderbilt/ etc. of the present day. Did I say robber barron? Oh dear! If they aren’t why oh why is it that you can upload your tree for free but if someone wants to see it they have to take out a membership? That to me is dishonest crooked and totally immoral. Their census may be alright but I would never trust a tree uploaded to the internet for all the tea in China. The best trees are the ones whereby the genealogist has done his own research. To prove my point a few years back say like 15 I uploaded a tree to ancestry. all the names were in order but the dates were all fake. Lo and behold that tree is now in the databases of more than 20 trees online with the fake dates so you see unless you are willing to do the hard work you remain the copier and I the genealogist. Cruel? Not at all! It just goes to show that 90% of us are copiers and 10% of us are real genealogists. As for ancestry.com the tree is there also. Oh btw with the proper javascript you can get anything on the net for free. It’s called hacking but in the case of ancestry.com it’s called good hacking.
I’m still hopeful that an open source project will come along. A Wikipedia of ancestry would be a neat thing, I think.
There is an open source website (several in fact). Also, you can see all public trees from ancestry.com on their sister site mundia.com.
Say what you will, ancestry is still the best place for real records and no free site will ever be able to compete. Why? For the simple reason that thousands of ancestry’s collections had to be purchased by them to be able to give to us. A free site would go broke paying for the rights just to give it away.
Thanks for the info! Maybe some day and open source website will catch up and take the lead.