Thursday, January 17, 2019

Dear Ancestry.com: Are You Fixing These Problems?

Many genealogists and family historians have bemoaned the apparent problems on Ancestry.com over the past few years.  I have posted the following over the last year about some of the perceived problems:

*  Good News and Bad News On Ancestry Member Tree Searches (12 November 2018)
*  How Accurate Is an Ancestry Quick and Dirty Tree? (5 November 2018)
*  The Power of an Ancestry.com Search From the Member Tree (10 October 2018)
*  Ancestry Search Quirk - "County and Adjacent Counties" Filter Doesn't Work (2 October 2018)
*  Has Ancestry.com Indexed the Ancestry Member Trees Yet? (15 August 2018)
*  Ancestry.com Says They Will Work on Technical Problems (11 May 2018)
*  Reader Comments on Ancestry Search Problems (1 May 2018)
*  Are There Search Problems on Ancestry.com? - UPDATED (25 April 2018)
*  Ancestry Member Trees, Indexing Rules, Cousin Bait, Source Citations and Me (18 December 2017)

And more earlier.

I, and Genea-Musings readers, have identified significant problems with the Ancestry search engine, presentation of results, indexing of Ancestry Member Trees, and other problems.  Ancestry.com users have been patient with Ancestry's efforts to fix the problems, but patience has a limit for many of us.

For instance, on 11 May 2018, Ancestry actually responded on the secret Ancestry.com Facebook group promising to fix the problems by the end of May 2018.  Unfortunately, the problems persist.  I face them every day as I research my ancestry.  

A)  The problems and issues that I would like to see fixed by Ancestry.com include:

1)  Ancestry Member Trees are not Indexed on a regular basis (daily, weekly, monthly at a minimum).  The trees were indexed in October 2017, and again in October 2018.  

I recommend monthly at a minimum, so that new trees and trees with new profiles and sources appear in the Index in a timely manner.

2)  Indexing the Ancestry Member Tree profiles apparently depends on them having at least one "Ancestry Source."  Those are records attached to a tree profile.  Only the profiles with an Ancestry Source are indexed.  My tree of over 52,000 profiles has over 100,000 source citations, but only about 20 profiles have an "Ancestry Source."  Almost all of my source citations are to the Evidence Explained standard, and are called "Other Sources" by Ancestry, as if they are inferior to "Ancestry Sources." Some researchers have been attaching one source to their profiles in order to be included in the Index.  

My recommendation is that ALL profiles in Ancestry Member Trees be indexed so that other researchers can be helped by profiles with "Ancestry Sources," "Other Sources," and even No Sources.  

For example, my grandfather's profile above will not be indexed by Ancestry with the current rules, even though I have over 50 source citations on this profile.  I added this profile, with all of the sources, in October 2017 to this new-at-the-time tree, and it is still not indexed.  No other Ancestry searcher can find it, or 52,000 others.  IMHO, this is felony stupid and obliterates the reason to put a searchable tree on Ancestry.

3)  Searching for records for a person in Ancestry record collections results in inconsistent results using "Categories."  The "Records" search works very well, with many search parameters that can be searched using broad or narrow search techniques.  When I switch to the "Categories" list, the list of record collections with results appears with numbers of results.  When I click on one of the record collections with a number of results (e.g., N), the results list for that collection often shows me 0 (zero) results.  Wait - it said there were N!  Where are they?  If I start a new search for the specific record collection, the N results usually appear.  There should be no inconsistencies here - something is wrong - if the Category list says there are N results, then clicking on that collection should provide N results.

4)  There has been a noticeable lack of Added (new!) record collections since October 2018, and very few collections have been updated.  The "Recently Added and Updated" page on Ancestry lists "Coming Soon" collections; until last week, some said "late 2018;" those now say "Early 2019."  The last new record collection on the Card Catalog today was added on 6 November 2018.  The last Updated collection on the Card Catalog today says 12 December 2018.   Why has the production of new and updated collections stopped?  When will they be started again?

5)  When I click on "View People with Hints" for my Ancestry Member Tree, I can see that there are thousands of "Records" Hints.  However, almost every time I click on the link to see the first Hints, I get a message "We're experiencing technical difficulties. Please refresh this page to try again."  Sometimes, refreshing works, but I often have to click on the "Photos" link and then the "Records" link to see the list of Records.  When will this be fixed so we can get on with research without aggravation?

6)  Apparently, Ancestry.com has a "Big Tree" that is used for the "We're Related" mobile app, the "Possible Ancestor" feature in Member Trees, "Life Story Overview" in DNA Circles. and for search results in Google for persons in  Ancestry Member Trees.  The problem is that some of the relationships are wrong because they come from some sort of coagulation of Ancestry Member Trees.

For instance, the "Life Story Overview" for my 3rd great-grandfather William Knapp (1775-1856) collects info from 56 trees, and summarizes his life as:

"When William Knapp was born in 1775 in Dutchess, New York, his father, Shubael, was 18 and his mother, Rebecca, was 8. He married Sarah Cutter in 1804 in Woodbridge, New Jersey. They had 19 children in 39 years. He died on June 16, 1856, in Newton, New Jersey, having lived a long life of 81 years, and was buried there."

Nope...we don't know his parents names, his purported mother would have been age 8 when she had him (the parents married in 1783), and William had only 11 children.  This is what happens when some person or algorithm makes decisions based on too much poor data.  My tree probably wasn't considered because it doesn't have "Ancestry Sources."

7)  So there is a BIG Tree.  Where did it come from?  Is it a descendant of the "One World Tree" or the "Ancestry World Tree" databases from ten years ago?  Can it be modified based on some sort of curator opinion, peer review or knowledgeable panel?  Is information being added to it all the time?  If so, by who? Will Ancestry automatically be using it for finding the common ancestors for DNA Matches?

8)  Every informed AncestryDNA user I know (and I know many of them) wishes that AncestryDNA would provide a Chromosome Browser.  A chromosome browser would enable a user to determine the chromosomes and segments of chromosomes that they match on for a specific DNA Match.  A Chromosome Browser would enable the user to download ALL of their chromosome segments for a group (or all) of their DNA matches to a .csv file, and therefore be able to use a spreadsheet to order the matches by chromosome and segment location to see which other users have the same large segment(s) and therefore are related to each other.

I know that AncestryDNA competitors 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and MyHeritage each have a chromosome browser that makes this happen with a full download of all segments for a group (say more than 20 cM) in seconds to a .csv file that can be opened in a spreadsheet.  AncestryDNA has the most users, but they have a primitive relationship finder (less than 0.7% of my AncestryDNA matches are in the "Shared Ancestors" list) and no chromosome browser.  Having a chromosome browser, a download of a set of segments, a clustering of matches (like AutoCluster), and suggested common ancestors from a BIG and accurate Tree would result in a competitive advantage for AncestryDNA.  It's really just data management and programming, right?

B)  Eight is enough!  I hope that Ancestry.com will have meetings with users at the RootsTech 2019 conference from February 27 to March 2 in Salt Lake City.  I hope that they address all of the issues and problems raised here.

C)  In addition, my readers may have suggestions for other Ancestry.com and AncestryDNA issues and problems - and I invite them to make a comment to their issues and problems on this blog post, or in their own blog or Facebook posts.  


=============================================

Disclosure:  I have had a paid subscription to Ancestry.com since 2000, and use the site every day.  I have received material considerations from Ancestry.com in years past, but that does not affect my objectivity in writing about their products and services.

The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2019/01/dear-ancestrycom-are-you-fixing-these.html

Copyright (c) 2019, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.

42 comments:

Lisa Van Gemert said...

Amen. I agree with everything you said, and I agree that there are other issues as well. The issue I think is the worst is not indexing well-sourced trees if there is no Ancestry source. That flies in the face of good genealogical practice and is indefensible as a practice.

Marian said...

Thanks for continuing to pursue these issues, Randy. I hope that all of Ancestry's representatives and ambassadors at RootsTech will be approached about this list by customers. It appears that public questioning online is not doing the trick. Maybe public questioning at conferences can get Ancestry's attention.

Marcia Crawford Philbrick said...

Randy, THANK YOU for pursuing this. I have an additional issue with DNA matches. I have known cousins with trees of their own who don't show up as a 'hint' with my DNA test, but do show up in the hint list for my mother's DNA test.
Also, I believe tree indexing is broken.

I've blogged about my issues at
https://heartlandgenealogy.wordpress.com/2019/01/18/indexing-and-dna/

cathyd said...

All very good points, Randy. I agree with everything -- except maybe the idea of daily refreshes to tree indexes. They may not have the server capacity to do that (unless they raise fees on us.) I've been subscribing to Ancestry since 2001, and at the World Explorer level for the past 10-12 years. Their server issues seem to have increased exponentially with the rapid increase of DNA sales (?) Whatever is going on (third party service provider?) they simply don't have those servers set up with proper fail-over. I get those "not available" errors CONSTANTLY -- especially with the DNA match pages.

I did not know about the so-called one tree, and hate the idea they may be conglomerating bad data. FamilySearch and Geni and Wikitree "one trees" are bad enough, but at least individual users can make changes -- or disconnect their own information. One Big Tree is a worthy goal, in theory, but in practice, not so much.

LauraH said...

I also have issues with the hints that say the hint had been removed, but yet it still shows up. Create a fix to remove them, or ignore them.

atwein said...

I would like to see color coding of relationship links to indicate the quality of that link. The source information should be analyzed as to the strength of the information in the record, AND the strength of whether the record applies to the correct person. If 19 member trees glowed red and yellow with respect to an ancestors parent relationships, and glowed bright green for the one member tree that had accurate information, things would start to straighten out on their own accord. Members would examine the stronger relationship and be more apt to copy the stronger choices.

Unknown said...

I submitted a test for Ancestry and have not heard a word on my test. It has been about 8 weeks. How much longer

Cappy said...

I've been trying to use Family Tree Maker. Ever since Ancestry sold the program I haven't been able to do anything with it. It gives me links, but when I try to follow them, it tells me I have to register and keeps coming back to it. Ancestry said to contact MacKiev, so I did. They kept giving me the run around, but no solution. Pretty sure someone only needs to tell the program to give me access, but it's not done. I can still upload and download my tree.

Ancestry said to try RootsMagic, so I ponied up for that. After having used FTM for so many years, not impressed plus, it keeps wanting me to purchase access to other genealogy sites.

Not found of using ancestry via the website. The features leave a lot to be desired.

TT said...

Searching location is ridiculous, countries changed names so many times and some people put what is was called when the relative lived there, what the relative put when they came to America, or what the area is now called. Place names change too. If you put a name under what the Nazis used (If that's your only source of info and people don't know any better, they won't know it was only the Nazi name...) add those together and you have people who see an actual relative, from a different country, from a different town and (sometimes with a new Americanized name) and they can't make the connection it's the same person. (I know this happened because a 3rd cousin's family Americanized their name and used what his g grandfather's documents said, but the area no longer exists and now goes by a completely different country. (Most of my tree is indexed because I imported it from myheritage, so most of my tree has myheritage tree as it's source! Some have an additional source from other's myheritage trees or their geni profiles through my heritage. But because geni and myheritage (and wikitree and family search from lds all use different town, country, systems, if I don't go on and put it like ancestry uses, I don't get leaves! (Don't get my started on the dna testing and populations... ). Most of my matches used by tree info, and I keep on getting matches/leaves with my data.. Really annoying. This doesn't happen on myheritage.

TT said...

Oh and you can't use anything but English. It looks like gibberish otherwise so your matches are limited to English speakers. 5 country matches with users on ancestry vs 39 on my heritage (which does have a hundred plus languages and you can search in one and find matches in all languages).

Unknown said...

I've had problems with not being able to access my own information, that I've already gotten myself from ancestry, like others it says not available or no longer there. Also the veteran's wall they used to have is no longer accessable to add or correct have complained multiple times to no avail their solution was a memory wall, if the wheel isn't broke don't fix it? Also the ability to see clues others have posted and updated as well.these are just a few

Unknown said...

While any of these van be seen as a huge problem, I ask you this, if it hadn't been for Ancestry.com and the internet where would you be with your tree today.

Randy Seaver said...

To Unknown (about DNA test):

I don't know what the time lapse should be. You apparently tested around Thanksgiving and they sold many test kits (millions?) since then which all got sent back for analysis. Call 1-800-ancestry and ask them.

Randy Seaver said...

To Unknown (on huge problem),

You are correct, I would not be nearly as far along in my research without Ancestry, and most of these problems are fairly minor in the big picture. But we do have the Internet and Ancestry and other sites, and they are very useful.

Ancestry has the most diverse and complex set of record collections and search features of all of them, but they don't have every collection. To their credit, almost every collection is indexed, but some of the indexes are poor (I didn't complain about that...especially probate records). I try to highlight NEW features and collections on Ancestry (and other sites) on my blog, and appreciate innovation everywhere. I want more innovation, and more collaboration, and more competition.

There were issues of servers and staffing and old software in the last several years that have probably contributed to the problems.

But they know about the stated problems, promised they would fix them, and haven't fixed them for months and sometimes years.

They are a private company now, so they don't have to tell us anything. But customer relations is important for every company.

Jeff and Lan Roberts said...

Thanks for posting these issues.

I recently tried to add Ancestry's new Traits feature to my wife's Kit, as I had added it earlier to my own. Both Kits are under my account. After a long call to their customer support, it turns out they can't add that to a second Kit on the same account, unless the second one is a minor. That makes absolutely no sense. Customer support said I could create a 2nd account for my wife, and buy a new Kit, of course, then add the Traits. Also makes no sense - I might as well buy another Kit from 23andme since their Traits feature is better anyway.

And BTW, I have uploaded our raw DNA data to promethease.com, which offers many traits for $12. The traits on ancestry are more of the fun or cute type, like cleft chin, eye color, etc.

Unknown said...

The only way to effect change is to have more competion in such sites. I have been very frustrated with my searches and do use other sites. With the cost of membership we should have a better search engine. I have complained to them and got the same answers, "We are working on it " Right....

Unknown said...

Randy I serendipitously came across your blog today and glad I did. I have been an ancestry member for years yet I am very much a novice compared to everyone else. My biggest issue is when inaccurate information is attached to a person and there really isn't a way with ancestry to have it corrected, other than contacting the owner of the tree,and my experience has been that it's ignored. Just as an example I was adopted and after finding my biological family I have my family tree with my bio family, however somehow my adopted parents information is used, and attached to members in my family on other members trees. I really feel like ancestry needs to do more to help correct inaccuracies and require a certain amount of accountability for providing accurate information. Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated and helpful. Thanks

Evelyn said...

That happened to us. They lost it and had to send us a new test and we had to wait an additional month. Got it on Christmas, got our results late March

Evelyn said...

I have no idea what I'm doing... its frustrating because I'm fairly certain half of my tree has errors and I don't know how to fix it. I can't find any immigration records for my great grand parents, even though I know the approx time they came and the ship they were on. I have seen inaccurate facts about my immediate family. I have tried to reach out to those people to fix it but to no avail. My sister and I have the same dad, different moms. She is listed as a close relative, her daughter, my niece is listed as my 1st cousin. I have no way of editing that relationship so it is corrected. And one more thing... I know I'm Scottish, but I had to have made a mistake on the "potential relative" hints because it seems pretty wild for me to be able to trace my grandmas family all the way back to Gregor MacGregor, chieftain the Wicked Clan Gregor! **although,my mom tells me her grandmother was pretty wicked**. Long story short... I feel like I need to delete the entire thing and start from scratch, only keeping things I know for certain are true and accurate...

Robert said...

My wife and I submitted our tests the week before Christmas. I got my results back about a week or so ago. My wife got hers this week. Not bad, given the volumes of new tests received from folks who got them as holiday gifts, wouldn't you say?

Timothy J. Barron said...

The biggest gap that I have is the lack of publicly posting all of my notes via Relationship Notes and Person Notes in Family Tree Maker.

cj said...

I find it frustrating that the only records I find are death, birth, marriage and military. I don't want a membership if I only get the same info. Also, I paid for a membership but could not access the African American portion unless I paid for an additional membership. Also, for some strange reason when I receive hints on my grandmother, she is noted in the hint ad my aunt. My links are correct on my tree.

Unknown said...

My problem is when I want to do a search for someone not in my tree it goes directly to my tree and tells me this person is not in your tree. If he was I would not need to do a search. Very irritating.

Bill said...

Randy-

Agree with all your points, especially the DNA tool ideas/concerns.

The move to cloud servers from Ancestry's own has been a huge driver of poor performance. It does seem to be getting a bit better, but not back to snuff and meanwhile all these other issues and opportunities are falling by the wayside.

My big personal annoyance is the "We’re sorry. The page you tried to access is no longer available." dead end after adding even simple records and always after adding more complex ones, like the census record for a large family or other ancestry tree info. This happens regularly on Chrome Browser on a MacBook Pro, my standard. It does not seem to happen much on Firefox, but that's not my usual browser. This never happened before the switch to the cloud servers. Have reported several times, no response.

To add to the point about not using people from a tree in the index when there are few/no ancestry records, let me add another example. For most of my US and UK family, I have a lot of Ancestry records, and in doing a broad search on a person, my tree is frequently cited at the top as "Matching Person from family trees"/"See more like this", e.g. my tree is indexed and my research on that person has a large or perhaps the largest number of Ancestry records. However on my wife's 1800's Southern Italy and Sicilian ancestors, we have accumulated many vital records, but as pictures in the gallery, not Ancestry records since the company doesn't have collections from those regions. NONE of those people show up in the Matching Person index pointing to my tree when a broad search is done. Very sad since those types of hints can provide great opportunities for cousin connections as well as help others to find the data we've been able to accumulate. Gallery items DO show up as individual hints in those searches, so they are not invisible, just not presented in as powerful a way as they could be.

Another rant area - Ancestry's PR group is either non-existent. lives in a cave or has not taken 21st century open, transparent and high frequency communication approaches during crises. There have been few communications on the multiple issues; where it has happened it's to small segments of users, like the FaceBook group vs to the full user community. The model for a modern alternative approach would be what the Family Tree Maker CEO did in their huge conversion issues last year, personally owning the issue and communicating frequently and openly about it. Yes it took a long time, but we were hearing from him regularly on status, remaining issues and plans to address. Ancestry CEO's virtual lack of acknowledgement of these issues is not becoming of a modern topnotch tech company.

(continued next post)
Bill Greggs

Bill said...

(Continued)
There WAS a communication from the new CEO as she took over the position recently, mostly crowing about all the good works that had been done or were on the horizon. One area was the supposed vast increases in delivering "hints" on persons already in a tree from Ancestry's vast set of collections - great idea. I've noticed that for people who I'd previously worked down to "0" hints - all of a sudden they have 3, 5 or even 7 new hints. But most of them turned out to be garbage - the hints were to someone of the same name but in a different state, country and/or century than the well-researched person in my tree. A waste of time to go through and ignore them all. Someone, somewhere in the company is reporting "success" up the chain and it's being believed by upper management, but turns out it's more of a problem than a benefit to users.

Best wishes on bringing all of these concerns to RootsTech - thank you for your leadership in being the bearer of bad tidings. Like you, I would have made nowhere near the progress on building and learning our family's history without the awesome capabilities/collections of Ancestry, including the vast DNA-tested population. But these issues are dragging down the next great leap.

Hopefully 2019 sees some progress on a lot of these fronts.

Bill Greggs

Sharon Garner said...

An additional problem with indexing the profiles - they don't consider your excellent sources to be sources at all but they do count "Ancestry trees" as a source. So if you quote something that could easily be garbage you're in, but if you use real sources with real citations, it doesn't count.

Unknown said...

I submitted my mother's DNA test 2018 in October it's almost the end of January 2019

Celtic Tree said...

Randy - I have had an ancestry tree since they started in the late 1990s. I have added photos and documents anytime I find any. I noticed many have "disappeared" from my photo gallery. Right now on my profile page's photo gallery you can see 187 media items. I just downloaded my tree to FTM and there are actually 600+ media items attached to my profile. I have been rescanning photos and documents thinking Ancestry had lost them.
Since FTM can find them, they are there somewhere! I've reported to Ancestry, but no reply.

Unknown said...

THANK YOU AND I AGREE WITH YOU WHOLE HEARTILY. KEEP UP THE WORK FOR A BETTER ANCESTRY.

Marshall said...

My big beef is that "Searching your messages" is broken. When I search for user name "Fooby", it says "no messages", even though I can see them right there on the page. Somtimes it finds stuff, usually it does not. You can page through your messages (I have 27 pages of messages) and search each one with your browser - what fun!

Also, when Ancestry says "You can download all the data associated with your account", they don't mean the messages you have sent or received. So you can't do local searches, either.

Every message I send on Ancestry says "My email is XXXXX." and suggests we continue the conversation there.

Ryan Ross said...

I think what we have here is a case of Ancestry "sitting on a big lead." They know they have to do very little to keep the large customer base they enjoy, because they've built huge head-starts in record databases, user trees, established partnerships/relationships, and DNA services. Why should they expend considerable funds fixing or adding things that won't change their bottom line much, and that will (if we're honest) only make a big difference for the geekiest of their current users? I predict that things won't change until Ancestry is forced to keep up with stiffer competition. Right now, their brand is still strong enough to support a certain complacency when it comes to innovation and improvement. They're still the place to get the most records, images, etc. They're still the most convenient place for people to build and share family trees online, even if there are better places to do so from the standpoint of sound research and tree mechanics. They're still the best at manipulating people's feelings and marketing these DNA ethnicity reports, which, let's face it, are the reason that probably 75%+ people test.

In short, Ancestry knows where its bread is buttered. When that starts changing, they'll start changing. But by then, perhaps, it will be too late for them.

EvaAnne Johnson said...

I agree with all your suggestions! In addition, I'd love to be able to search in my own tree using more than just a name. I often search by location to find relatives that lived in a particular location, and the way that I search in my own tree right now, it's virtually impossible to search or browse by location. I also use Reunion on my laptop, and I always have to switch over to the Reunion software in order to search by location (or anything other than name!)

I'd also love love love to have a chromosome browser! I have given three relatives AncestryDNA, but I've had to export their DNA results to use on another platform that has the chromosome browser because I've found that it's virtually impossible to determine how matches are related on AncestryDNA unless both of us have enormous and accurate trees.

Keep up the good work, and let's hope that Ancestry.com makes some changes soon!

searchshack said...

Grrrr Ancestry - In addition to these excellent issues from all the above users -- Some problems are with basic stuff. Last few days some links were not working!! Today I click on the link New records - See all New Records and get "We’re sorry, this page is no longer available. Return to previous page" . So try to back into it via the search page and Card catalog not working the first time but did the third time. And earlier in the week the Your DNA results Summery would not work for part of that day. We pay to access this basic information!

Jane Bonny said...

I confess to looking only for trees that have sources only to discover that the ONLY sources are other trees.

The whole collaboration thing is completely inop. It's not the old system where you could see who is using your data or the same sources; it's not the new system where you can create a network.

Finding Members is hit or miss.

Search DNA results by surname is a joke. Even if you look at the match's entire tree, there is an excellent chance that you will not find the surname in question.

Marcia Crawford Philbrick said...

Randy - I was searching public member trees last night to see if I could figure out who some of the people are in the 1790 Kentucky tax lists. As I was searching, I noticed several UNSOURCED trees. I then tried to find someone in my tree who doesn't have an Ancestry source, but I wasn't successful.
I just rechecked this morning and I can still pull up UNSOURCED trees. The search I used was
Alexander Crawford
died 1823 (+/- 5 years) in Kentucky
Only the date had and 'exact' selection. It says there are 262 trees. I had to scroll down a bit, but on the first page of results there were at least 5 UNSOURCED trees.

Kaye L-K said...

Amen. Thanks for posting this and I hope Ancestry.com takes it to heart.

I would add two things:

1) I want Hints for which I've selected "IGNORE" to go away and not show up again! Yet, they keep reappearing.

2) It seems that Ancestry.com doesn't bother generating any Hints for people within a family that I have not "visited" for awhile within Ancestry.com. However, once I do go into a family and edit a person, that is when Ancestry.com starts to re-generate Hints for that family. What's up with that?!

Kaye L-K said...

Oh..I left out one big issue (not a problem, per se) with Ancestry.

LACK OF REPORTS!

Right now I have to use Family Tree Maker and sync it with Ancestry to get any kind of useful reports. And we all know that Sync errors can occur, which can halt our progress while we look for solutions by calling in to FTM or Ancestry support and restoring backups and all that jazz.

WHY can't Ancestry.com create some useful reports for us? Then we wouldn't have to rely on a second software to link to, thus having to maintain a second database.

Or is it that they just want our genealogical data? And if that's the case, why are we paying them so much per month/quarter/year when they are also benefiting? Why can't WE also benefit from some reports?

Kaye L-K said...

Another issue:

1) I have noticed up above in the comments that someone else added this as well. I use the very, very latest version & build of FTM with Ancestry. Random media items in Ancestry will disappear in Ancestry.com for people. The headings will be there but the body of the item will not be. (It usually happens for obituaries that I have typed in. If I look in FTM, the obituary is there.)

So I have to reenter the obituary in Ancestry.com. No explanation from Ancestry.com can be given.

2) Likewise, I've noticed that for "Headstone" Media types in Ancestry.com I sometimes won't be able to edit them within a person's profiile. (The "Edit" button does not even appear for me to click on.) However, if I go to "Media Gallery" and look for that person's headstone, I CAN edit it there. And what I find is that one of the required fields is missing...either the "Picture Name" or "Name on headstone." Once I fill that in again and click on the "Update Photo" button, then I the "Edit" button appears for that Headstone media type under that person's profile. Ancestry.com can't explain that either.

And what's even MORE interesting, when I called in to Ancestry.com support and gave her an example of a Headstone media record that I couldn't edit, the support person was able to edit it on HER end. ??!!?? So she gave me all kinds of things to try that, of course, did not work. I had to find what the problem was on my own and let THEM know.

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Bill said...

Randy
A recent comment on this thread brought your original post back to my attention. What a difference a year and a half makes.

At the time I agreed wholeheartedly with your points and offered a concern about performance. But my overwhelming issue with Ancestry for the past 6 months or more has been related to atrocious performance on regular everyday tree tasks. Opening a hint or an existing record on a person; adding a record, particularly more complicated ones like a family census record with a number of children, but even on simple records; doing a tree search to pull up a person; opening up my tree on login; manually adding a spouse or child. These issues occur every day of the week at all hours of the day.

The issue of saving a record and then getting the 'screen of death' saying "We’re sorry. The page you tried to access is no longer available" is somewhat reduced, but still occurs.

This is not all the case with most tasks related to DNA which zip quickly from click to loading of whatever was called for. Such a huge difference - performance in that area is what we've all been accustomed to on family tree tasks.

Can you shed any light on this issue? Is it still related to Ancestry's move to cloud servers vs. their own? Do they acknowledge the performance issue anywhere? Certainly there's none in periodic emails that I get.

Thanks for sharing any insights you might have.

Best,
Bill Greggs
bgreggs@gmail.com

Marshall said...

Embarrassing Ancestry story for today:

I manage DNA tests for my in-laws; and mail sent to their Ancestry IDs (free) gets routed to me.

Today I got two of them (one to each) introducing "Story Scout", and saying "We’ve found a story about your
grandfather, XXXX." with a button "View Story" that opens up a browser window that says "This page is no longer available".

Oops.

The second email (for my mother in law) touts a story about her grandmother that ALSO goes to "This page is no longer available".

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