Ancestry.com.au Reviews

(based on 5 reviews)

175 of 387 people found this review helpful

Australian records are incomplete, poorly organised and full of transcription errors.

Examples: 1. Some shipping records state the person came from Limerick but when you look at the image it clearly states Tipperary. There are a lot more! All the electoral rolls are categorised as 1930s. So if you want 1954 you will have to wade through all the other years first. BDM records are incomplete and not up to date. Some records from the 1800s are not included. Victoria's death records are available up to 1988 (as at 2013) but Ancestry does not.

The site has constant outages and often loses data (including people profiles from the tree). People mysteriously change location in the tree. One example the daughter gave birth to her own grandparents!
Synchronising with Family Tree Maker for Windows often creates more errors than updates and often crashes.

When Ancestry asked for feedback/opinions I told them - fix the errors instead of concentrating on the appearance. They changed the appearance of the site again. Errors were not fixed.

For Australian information Ancestry appear to be all about money and data mining and offer poor customer service in return.

In summary, I would not recommend Ancestry.com.au to a friend.

238 of 431 people found this review helpful

It's a good basic site WHEN you can get onto it. Either SERVICE UNAVAILABLE message comes up or WEBSITE IS TOO BUSY TO SHOW THE PAGE message comes up.

If you are lucky enought to actually sign in and and start a search you will after a couple of steps encounter the WEBSITE IS TOO BUSY message and no matter how many times you refresh it is no good. Go back a step to sign off and WEBSITE TOO BUSY so you can't even sign off.

You pay good money to access a site and you either can't get into it or once in you're stuck.

A few months age access was fine, I think they've become too popular and their server can't cope.

In summary, I would not recommend Ancestry.com.au to a friend.

223 of 443 people found this review helpful

Like most genealogy sites subscription to service requires credit card details after which it is impossible to cancel or adjust method. Client has no access to options for account so host retains complete control and elects to automatically renew subscriptions. Only way is for client to request cancellation by email and depend on the goodwill of host. In my opinion this is the biggest hurdle to using any of these sites. It is not that they have not heard of methods for user access to their account as is widely used; it is that they deliberately choose to deny users an easy option to account cancellation. For this reason I will never touch any genealogy sites. They are all the same.

In summary, I would not recommend Ancestry.com.au to a friend.