ancestry.com info.

[CountAllVotes]

fellow searchers out there!

I've been a subscriber on and off to ancestry.com for the past few years.

I recently posted about how someone stole my grand cousin who was a bachelorette until she married her boss in the early 1950s in her 60s. She'd never been married before nor had any children. Period.

Next, I found that this same line has taken another hit of sheer thievery of the worst -- that of my own great grandfather who I KNOW was never married but once and died fairly young leaving beyond my great grandmother who died a few years after he did. Period.

So, having two of my close relatives stolen and inserted into other people's trees annoys me and I feel it contaminates the purpose of ancestry.com.

If you don't know for sure, don't go "stealing" someone else making this whole process and point of research becomes irrelevant and highly contamined contaminated IMO.

That said, I decided to hell with ancestry.com and was planning to cancel my subscription which ends on November 30, 2012. Period. Or so I thought.

I happened to be on it the other day deleting a few things knowing I was going to shut 'er down so to speak.

So, I went to click on subscription info. and it said until Nov. 30, 2012 I was paid for and it was set to auto renew.

I began to wonder if I'd remember to cancel it on/before November 30, 2012 day before yesterday on the 27th of November given the way things have been going with me lately = OVERLOAD OK?

I decided I'd better do it now while I think of it and when I put in the request, it said they had to have this request submitted lAT LEAST 2 DAYS BEFORE YOU PLAN TO CANCEL. So had I waited until Nov. 30, 2012 (tomorrow) to do it, I'd be stuck for paying for another year. This message about the 2 day thing does not appear until you hit the cancel button BTW so if I had not done it, I would not have known about it as is is not posted anywhere that I can find. Can anyone find this info.? I've looked everywhere and no nothing about this. Nope.

Huh? I wonder how/if this is even legal.

I can no longer access my account, although paid for in full, and ancestry.com would have auto-renewed me had I not by sheer luck managed to give the 2 days advance notice which I did to comply with their "rules". I was immediately shut out after I hit that cancel buttom btw.

Times are kind of hard for some of us out there, myself included, and I simply want nothing else to do with a research tool that I know to be not accurate and becoming more contaminated with ever second in time that passes as people spread information to others which becomes incorporated into their own information thus making this whole process fatally flawed at best.

You kinda suck ancestry.com and shame on you for playing games with your valued "customers"!

END OF RANT.

Yikes. I also meant to post this so OTHERS OUT THERE WILL KNOW AB0UT THIS IF THEY ARE PLANNING TO CANCEL OUT ANCESTRY.COM (ANCESTRY.CON typo lol ...) and are waiting for your "time to be up" -- it is "up" at least 2 days before you think it is.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

1. I signed up when I heard they were looking for buyers

so I could gather all the info I could before it went to crap. I found a lot, but I found a lot of crap too.
I had my dad give me a 'gift subscription, so it would just expire and we wouldn't have to worry about cancelling it. I think I have a few weeks left, I should do a few more searches to see if anything new pops up.

[CountAllVotes]

4. Good plan

Yep, they've gone to crap. Sad isn't it?

[Spider Jerusalem]

2. I'm not really quite sure what you're on about

how do you mean "stolen"? If your relatives/ancestors are also the relatives and/or ancestors of other people (which seems not only probable but likely) then Ancestry's "World Tree" thing making those links is not "stealing"; personally, I've done quite a lot of tracing things back through variously available records, and discovered some things independently, but my parents' families have been in America since the seventeenth century and are more or less well-researched; there are books, there are thousands, or tens of thousands, or possibly even hundreds of thousands of descendants of my immigrant ancestors, and in most cases I'm going back over well-trodden ground and indebted to those who've done the work on those genealogies before me; I have no problem at all with people taking any information I happen to discover through what are after all public records and using it as long as they do so accurately.

[CountAllVotes]

3. placing someone in their tree that does NOT belong there

I've had this happen twice now.

Enough is enough!!

However, I will admit the 1940's census is interesting -- not even the question 'where was your father/mother born?' to be found ... of course ...

[Spider Jerusalem]

5. But is it an automated process...

or is it someone making the mistake of "name's the same"? (Which is the single biggest source of headaches I've found, honestly, especially when you have multiple people of the same name in the same area at the same time).

[CountAllVotes]

8. the sad part is this ...

Said person, my great grangrandfather that is, was difficult to find in the obits. of his time (wrong date for some reason), so I posted his obit. as well.

Therefore, there was not doubt as to who he was and where he lived, etc.

It was sheer thievery plain and simple as he was not married to a woman in Iowa named "Annie". He was a native of San Francisco and died in Oakland. His life really was that simple.

Anway, I'm done with ancestry.com for now. They were useful for awhile but as of now, they are pointless and a waste of money, at least for me anyway.

[Spider Jerusalem]

9. A mistake is not "thievery", though

it's a bit hyperbolic to suggest it is (and honestly is that any better or worse than posthumous Mormon baptism?)

[CanonRay]

20. People make mistakes

so contact them via message and tell them they have the wrong person...if it were me, I'd correct my mistake. I bet most people would. It's not ancestry.com's fault. I've found it to be a very useful site.

[Gormy Cuss]

6. The biggest complaint I have about ancestry.com is that they've ALWAYS made it hard to leave.

It's just ridiculous. I hope that someone there reads this thread. I'm someone who would have spent hundreds of dollars on that site by now if not for that.

[Spider Jerusalem]

7. My only problem with that is that you can't cancel online and have to call

I never found it hard, though, just ring up and speak to a representative.

[Gormy Cuss]

10. It's both the inability to cancel online and problems getting through on the call line.

I've signed up three times over the years. The first two times it took days to even get the call answered by a human. The third time I couldn't remember the answer to some authentication question (nothing in the sign-up process warned that the data would be used that way, but lesson learned -- after a ten minute customer service call.) That time I DID see that the warning that one had to notify them two days in advance, which wasn't unreasonable to me, but the fact that they shut off my account at that very moment rather than when the paid time expired really annoyed me.

I'm considering signing up again but I'm waiting until I've organized my list of objectives so that I can maximize the value of a short term world membership.

[csziggy]

15. When you sign up you can pre-set the cancellation

I found this out when I first joined Ancestry.com. I had an offer for a short term membership and wasn't sure I wanted to stay on for more than the three month trial period. When I called in, the customer representative was very helpful. He told me that I could have him set the cancellation date for the end of the trial period and not have to remember to call back to cancel or to rest the account information to not automatically renew.

It worked great - at the end of the three months even though I had forgotten the date my trial would end my membership lapsed. By then, I was sucked in and signed up for another year (at a great discount, calling to renew was worth the hold time since they gave me a 50% discount AND World membership for free!). Since then I have decided that it is worth it to me to have the auto renewal.

But last year there was an interesting situation. Our credit card company changed our card number and I forgot to change it on the Ancestry site. My membership ran out in September, but I didn't notice. I could still access the site, do my research, update my online tree, get emails from other Ancestry users, etc. It was only when I got Family Tree Maker and tried to link it to my online tree that I had a problem.

I got two free months before that happened. Then because the representative felt bad about the 'inconvenience' he gave me an extra month free to make up for it. And there was a free month with the Family Tree Maker purchase. Now I renew in January.

To get the best deals and to pre-set the cancellation date you do have to call in but it does remove the worry about having Ancestry automatically renew when your budget can't handle it.

[CountAllVotes]

16. actually, my plan is this

They will and always do have a "sale" after you've been off of it for a few months. They then offer you a membership for a lot less, like $100.00 for the year v. $155.00 for the year.

I'm going to wait on that.

If they don't offer me such a thing, well, I'll just move along to other things.

Their largely B.S. "trees" from where are doing me not much good at all.

I know who I am looking for and actually the best *tip* I ever found was of my own doing and had nothing at all to do with ancestry.com.

Seems the old cousin I found has written an entire book about my mother's family and she did the research in the 1970s long before they had ancestry.com or the internet.

She has a pile of info. and pictures too. I found her on my own and ancestry.com had little role in this. I found out when her mother (my aunt) died the year after my own mother did at the age of 94 years. I obtained a copy of my aunt's death cert. and there was a name/address on it and I sent that name/address a Xmas card and said, "You don't know who I am and I don't know who you are but ...".

I received a telephone call on Xmas eve. 2008 from her saying "Bingo! Hello ... it is me, your cousin in Indiana!". Wow, what a shock that was!

[csziggy]

18. Anytime they think they're going to lose you, they will make deals

So your plan is not bad. But do think about calling rather than signing up online and set a predetermined close date if budget is a problem. That way you know there won't be any surprises if you forget to stop their auto renewals.

As I said in another message, I barely use any of the other people's trees unless I am at a dead end. Mostly I am collecting documentation, which is what Ancestry is terrific for.

For old genealogies, check Google Books and Archive.org - both have a lot of those old one published in the 1800s that you can download for free in various formats. I remember my Mom trying to find some of the titles back in the 1960s and not being able to get access to them. Now I can download the entire book and print the needed pages at my leisure.

I've got a big advantage over most people - my father's mother and her grandfather did a lot of family research over a hundred years ago. Then my mom researched her family fifty years ago. My husband's mother exhaustively research her lines and most of her husband's. But they did not have access to as much of the original information as I can now get online.

They could get census indices - I can get scans of the original pages, as just one example. Those old genealogies that were only in a few libraries are now online. Ship passenger lists that were not indexed are now easily searchable online.

My main pursuit is assembling more corroborating documentation rather than tracking down ancestors. I have been lucky to take some branches back further - Mom and Grandmother mostly stopped once they proved their Revolutionary ancestors for DAR.

[Gormy Cuss]

17. Thanks for that info

I'll keep that in mind when I sign up again in January. I tend to sign up for 3 months every other year. I'm due for an FTM upgrade and that usually has a free period thrown in too.

[polly7]

19. I've been caught a few times forgetting to unsubscribe soon enough.

I was so mad at myself, but was able to hunt down a few elusive ancestors and work on trees for some friends. Never again though .... it's just way too expensive.

[fleur-de-lisa]

11. I was recently on the phone with someone from ancestry.com . . .

with a question about my subscription. Although this was not the reason for my call, I complained to her that I was very angry about their policy of auto-renewal. She said that most customers preferred that for the pure convenience of not having to remember to renew. I told her that was bullshit, it was simply a way to con people out of money.

I am still a member and I have no plans to cancel any time soon because I use the site quite frequently and I've found a lot of interesting information on it. But I keep very detailed records of my account and ALWAYs put my renewal on my iphone calendar.

But back to the OP . . . what in the world do you mean by 'stealing'? You know, you could have kept all of your information private if you didn't want anyone using it. What's the purpose of using an online database if not to share information?

I have noticed that people have linked to my original data or entered stuff into their tree that I know to be incorrect. If it really bothers you that much, send that person a private message and politely tell them that you believe their information is wrong and tell them why. No need to be so dramatic about it . . . have you considered that it was simply a mistake?

[CountAllVotes]

13. The purpose of this type of research is ...

To find relatives hopefully, not having one of your own relatives picked up by someone that does not seem to have a clue as to what they are doing and putting them in an erroneous family tree.

I could perhaps see these sorts of mistakes if even the places involved were similar, but its a long haul from San Francisco to Iowa!

The info. is there because I have been hoping to find links to this particular line of people that seemed to all but vanish after The Great Famine in Ireland. What happened to them? Were there more of them? Any brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, etc.? I've been trying to find out more only to find that what little info. I do have is being misused as I continue to hit that same brick wall that will never go away it seems to me.

It irks me to think that people just snatching up members of various families out there without even doing the necessary research to verify that yes, it does belong in their tree.

My point is that this sort of incompetency makes this whole effort of researching our past and our ancestors that much more difficult if it is now being filled with errors because they thought the name might fit somehow. Where does this info. go next? How long will these errors live on for? This is my main concern with this.

[munseepine]

21. Delayed Response

Never read this until today ... I have a family genealogical website myself, and yep, my favorite responses are from ladies (?) like Lisa here, who have yet to figure out that Ancestry.com is NOT (and has never claimed to be) the end-all of genealogical information, but a tool that you can use to create your own Family Tree, along with many other tools that are available to you. Of COURSE it may not be correct - I've seen State and Federal records so messed up I figured the census taker had gone deaf or something. It's up to YOU, Lisa, to do your research, or politely make the corrections you feel need to be made - instead of jumping up and down and squealing like a stuck pig that Ancestry.com has wrong information in it. I had one stupid woman like Lisa send me an e-mail about an error in a family group (data courtesy of a book written in the 1890's) in which she started off shrieking that it was "cruel" of me to list a child of her great grandmother that she KNEW her great-grandmother never had, and obviously, I was out to ruin the woman's reputation when she wasn't alive to defend herself, and she was going to sue!!! (I sat there and stared at the e-mail thinking, "Wow. Somebody went off her meds ...&quot I'd feel bad for the poor Ancestry customer service rep who had to deal with Lisa, were I not so irked at their inserting pop-up ads all over the place. You can barely maneuver your way around their site as it is, even with a pop-up blocker. Of course this site does the exact same thing (double red-underlines every other word) - so I'm not sure why I bother even complaining anymore.

[GentryDixon]

12. When you first sign up it tells you to notify them days before

the end of the month. I thought it was 3 days.

As far as someone stealing your family member, I found my grandmothers name has been changed ever so slightly and incorporated into their tree. It makes me nuts when people pull names at will, without doing research to backup their entries. I make a comment on the census record when I see such mistakes.

[csziggy]

14. You can keep your family trees private

And only allow people you invite to see the information. That is how I have my trees since I don't want people 'stealing' my research, much of which is not from Ancestry sources.

I never trust any trees on Ancestry - as you've found people grab information without verifying it and dump it into their trees. One of the classic cases I ran into was one of my Aaron Harlan (there are generations of Aaron Harlans, at least five and I'm descended from a series of four) is recorded as being married to his mother in a bunch of trees. Obviously someone made that mistake and a lot of other people blindly inserted it into their lines.

I stay in Ancestry for the original source material - census, vital records, etc. I use other people's trees for hints when I run into brick walls - but I always verify. When it comes to Ancestry, the motto should be "Don't trust - VERIFY!"