Ancestry.com Reviews

(based on 22 reviews)

83 of 159 people found this review helpful

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... (Read the full review)

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

264 of 417 people found this review helpful

This is pricey. I tried Geni.com (free with no privacy & no reliability:"curators" rewrite your family tree) and am happy with the move to Ancestry.com. Ancestry gives you privacy without meddling but with an ability to share and collaborate if you so choose.

Data bank is good & improving, but could be better--how about more obits, more NYC birth & death records: I could go on. Links to FindAGrave are very helpful & that kind of resource could also be expanded.

Geography is not a strong point, with the place names or with the maps in LifeStory.

Search algorithms could be better, particularly with surnames capable of many (mis)spelllings.

The website takes some getting used to and navigating back & forth can be difficult. The iPhone app lacks some functions and is even more difficult to use.

Overall, though, a very good site.

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

244 of 453 people found this review helpful

I have been subscribed to Ancestry.co.uk for nearly a year now. On the whole it is an excellent concept and seems in my opinion to offer far more that other programs.
It is by far the easiest to search for people and the overall layout is great for my purposes. I like the ready access to a tree layout , person detail and places.

However I find 5 things are now clouding the overall picture.

1. Inability to remove unwanted items. I have a number of entries stating "Shared Facts with Unknown", which should be removed but cannot be.
2. Location names are changing to undecipherable 7 figure numbers which according to 2Ancestry" they have no idea why it is happening and have no clue how to resolve the issue.
3. Added media items are moving themselves from the person concerned, to incorrect people in the tree.
4. There is far too much bias toward reults from USA. Realising the program originates from there, it would be nice if it could be restricted when required, to the country required in the search.
5. Without subscribing to the "Wholeworld" program, ... (Read the full review)

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

241 of 474 people found this review helpful

The searches are amazing. You do a search, review, modify current data, and search again, and it will use modified results to add to the search depth of subsequent searches. I have not lost any of my data, even though I have hundreds of newly discovered relatives. Ancestry.com organizes your data so well and I am so pleased. The charts are so easy to use.

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

287 of 515 people found this review helpful

I've subscribed to Ancestry.com for many years. I consider it essential for my research, but it can be extremely frustrating to use, and you really need to know what you are doing in order to evaluate the search results. The best things about it are the quantity of records, the advanced search, and the US Census Images. I use the advanced search for my initial search on each person, tweaking the settings based on who I'm searching for. The fuzzy search is pretty good, but searches often either miss relevant records or return vast numbers of irrelevant records. Also, transcription errors are rife, and I often have to "trick" the search engine into finding people whose names have been mistranscribed. Thank goodness users can now enter alternate names! The search also doesn't do very well at finding some obvious spelling variations -- it's quite hit or miss. (For instance, I had to do separate searches on "Mc Coy" and "McCoy," though I think they may have fixed this by now.) Another problem is that the proliferation of Public Member Trees has resulted in a proliferation of wrong information that is mindlessly copied by other users, and most users don't document... (Read the full review)

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

234 of 442 people found this review helpful

I have been a member of Ancestry.com for three years, and when my subscription expired earlier this month, I didn't renew it. I am undecided on that. It is horribly expensive for somebody on a fixed income. For the amount of time it takes to find one name in a category, in the right state, it is terribly time consuming. Most of the time I end up scrolling through 100s of names before I find the right one. It would be a really big help if they would be arranged alphabetically under each category. Example: under birth, death, marriage, christening, etc. Instead I type in a name and end up getting many in the wrong states, and the categories are all mixed up. At this time I am looking into other paid sites, and still deciding if I am going to renew. I live off $700 a month total income, and it is hard to come up with that amount of money for the help that I get. A year ago when I was deciding if I should pay extra for the World Membership,I contacted Ancestry for information and... (Read the full review)

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