» Select Another Category of Reviews
 

Ancestry.com Reviews

Ancestry.com image

 
Editor's Overall Rating:
Average User Rating:
(based on 22 reviews)

Category: Genealogy Sites (AKA Family Tree Websites)
Website: http://www.ancestry.com



Editor's Review Costs & Features Videos User Reviews
 

« Back to all the Ancestry.com User Reviews


Great Site, Many Historical Records.
14 May 2017
Reviewer: An Old Timer from Chicago, IL, USA

78 of 150 people found this review helpful

Search Effectiveness:
Ease of Navigation:
Features:
Technical Support:
Help Files / Documentation:
Ease of Joining / Registration:
Value for Money:
Overall Star Rating:


While Ancestry.com is a bit on the pricey side, I feel it is worth the money spent.

Trees can be public or private. Living persons are not visible to anyone but the owner of the tree and those who the owner has shared full read/write access to. Persons with membership can build one or many trees. Trees can be easily deleted if they are no longer needed.

The great advantage is the very extensive hinting and search system. In building a personal tree, a patron can either manually enter a starting name and go from there, or upload a GEDCOM file and use the results.

Once basic information has been entered about a person (name, birth or death date and place), after a few moments, hints start appearing. In addition, a Search feature can be implemented to search the entire record collection. As new collections are added, new hints will appear for persons in the tree. As historic records are added to a person, a citation is formed. In addition, each collection has a very well-written description and sample citation.

Searches of the historic collections can be performed from within the tree or with no connection to any tree. While Boolean searches are not part of the system, there are options to vary the limits for each search term, such as surname, given names, dates and places. Searches can be limited to various collections, including narrow segments of the collection.

Persons with FamilySearch accounts can form a connection between (deceased) persons on their tree with the massive single collaborative tree in FamilySearch and exchange data and sources back and forth between the two sites.

Ancestry also features some imported (from other sites) data and indexes. One of the most useful is the Find-a-Grave records, which is generally current. The Social Security Death index now lags (due to government regulations) by four years. Not only are U.S. federal censuses available, but many local territorial and state censuses are also available and indexed.

Most elements of the indexes can be modified (actually, added to) so that searching is more likely to find the person in the index and access the images of the collection.

It is hard to fault this site, but there are a few irritants. One of them is the lack of suggested copy when entering a place name. The default is USA even though I use United States exclusively for places. At one time, the system remembered my entries with United States, but not now.

Ancestry also supports a DNA service, although my wife and I found that the results were not always the best and compared with the results from 23andMe, the latter had more complete results that were more accurate with respect to a person's written genealogy.

Portions of the site are free. If you can afford it, I recommend the full package for all the features that are available.

In summary, I would recommend Ancestry.com to a friend.



Was this review helpful?   Yes or No

« Back to all the Ancestry.com User Reviews


Comments on this Review
comments powered by Disqus

 





» Click here to visit Ancestry.com

or

« Back to the rest of our Genealogy Sites Reviews