In fairness to Ancestry they offer much more than the Trees. Access to old newspapers, census and DAR records, and much more. If you’ve got the genealogy bug, Ancestry may be worthwhile. To economise just go on a long sleepless binge of searches and cancel the subscription when searches are delivering diminished returns (or when your partner or psychiatrist complains too much about the sleepless binges :eek: ).
What I don’t like about Ancestry.com is that I could find no way to correct information that they had wrong.
My maternal grandmother was given a completely different name. Without registering or paying them something I can’t correct the inaccuracy.
What Baker said.
I did find some interesting information about my paternal side, but nothing on my maternal side that wasn’t in the family Bible.
Can I pit Ancestry for something else? They are hoovering up one genealogical, biographical, or historical website after another; services which are now generally free. In many cases these services have remained free, but that doesn’t mean they’ll always continue that way.
Ancestry has invested a lot of time in indexing census forms, and good on them for doing that. They deserve to be paid for the effort. But in the process, it seems have also cornered all online access of any kind to any census forms of 1790 - 1930. 1940, alone, is freely available on the Bureau’s website.
I don’t expect to be able to do an indexed name search for free. But in cases when I know what tiny hamlet my ancestors lived in during 1900 or 1910, I thought by now I’d be able to find them on the census sheet for that community.
Well the Mormons also grab as much free data as they can, and aren’t likely to change to a subscriber model, so Ancestry can’t become a full monopoly.
And you could always convert to a different nationality. All Norwegian public record data is free.
I remember that. The fastest way was to cancel the card they had, then sue them when they tried to hassle you for non payment.
Not when the print is small and at just at the sweet spot of too-close for the top of my bi-focals and too far for the bottom. Or the price simply isn’t there, which Illinois needs to crack down on, but with our budget deadlock Illinois isn’t cracking down on much.
Actually, it was really easy to quit. I always spammed the email address of the CEO from the account I wanted to cancel. It got cancelled within the hour.
Oh that’s a good one.
I’m annoyed by come-ons for such as internet, phone service or cable where it says something like “$10 a month!”, then in teensy letters: “for the first 12 months”, but nowhere does it say what it costs after that.
There’s a fun one I hadn’t seen until I was debating signing up for Planet Fitness, at which point I discovered that their “ten bucks a month” price was actually
Only $10 per month!
Plus also more money than that
Seems they also had a sign-up fee, an annual fee, and my favorite, an “oh, you want to actually use the stuff we have?” upcharge of double the monthly price. It still would’ve come out a bit cheaper than my next-best option, but I went with the place with the non-scummy price structure (and given a lot of what I’ve heard about PF since then, I’m glad I did).
I have to admit, though, it’s an intriguing business model. It seems to work gangbusters for PF, so I wonder why you don’t see more of it — the only comparable thing I think I’ve encountered is the “resort fee” on Vegas hotels. Makes me want to open a used car lot where I sell for 10 easy payments of just $25 a month (does not include $10,000 purchasing fee).
So much easier in Iceland, there you can just download an app to find out if you’re about to bang a relative when you’re bar hopping.
My credit card lets me set up temporary credit card numbers that expire in a short time. I did that when I signed up for the free trial.
While we are sharing ancestry.com stories, shortly after my mother died they started sending me emails exclaiming that they had found new information on one of my relatives which they would share with me for a fee. They were trying to sell me my mother’s obituary information.
Also in teensy letters: that the $120 for the whole year has to be paid all at once.
Why would you even NEED an app for that in Iceland? 
Steve Case didn’t think so.
I was pretty annoyed to discover the Roku that I bought, in a store, required credit card info before it would allow me to use it, even for free channels or services that are paid for outside of Roku.
Excellent vision may also be fundamental. Some stores (I’m kinda thinking it’s CVS in particular) have sale signs on nearly everything that usually also say, at the bottom, in nearly microscopic font size, that it’s for store card members.
Elsewhere, I’m often annoyed by shelves full of very similar products, with sale signs or often even regular shelf price tags, where it’s hard to figure out exactly which shelf tags go with which product. The products aren’t always exactly above their own price tags, and sometimes one needs to hunt around to find the right price tag. Then, the products are often described with some really obscure abbreviation on the tag, and the size/quantity is often cryptic, and the bar codes on the tag (if any) aren’t always the UPC codes (or last 5 digits thereof) that are on the product itself.
Target is especially bad about this.
My sister asked me to look at her DNA match results at ancestry.com … and I’m reminded how much I hate that website.
The DNA match results themselves are superb and almost amazing! They “survey a person’s entire genome at over 700,000 locations.” I’m not sure exactly what that means but they can find 4th and 5th-8th cousins. My sister’s DNA is matched to several thousands of other members who are Distant cousins, and many hundreds of 4th cousins.
BUT. When my sister purchased the DNA test she was given a different account. Click anywhere interesting in the DNA results page and you get a request for $99. My sister has already paid the $99, but we have to log out and log-in with the different account to access those features. :smack: My sister has pointed this out to Ancestry several times, receiving promises to fix but it’s still the same years later. The two accounts use the same email, same credit card, etc. I’m sure people giving up and clicking away an extra $99 is part of their business plan.
Of course even when you do click from the $99 account, you’re likely to be disappointed. “Family Tree” is a frequent click and results in an ungodly, almost unusable display that scrolls for miles off the screen in every direction into fields which are immune to any convenient control-C copy anyway. Am I missing something? If I hold down Ctrl, Shit and Alt while scratching my nose when clicking “Family Tree” is there a civilized ancestor table that will present instead of the ungodly mess?
I started dabbling in Internet genealogy almost 20 years ago. Some of the early sites, e.g. Rootsweb, were obviously altruistic — genealogy lovers helping other genealogy lovers. The early sites have all been bought by Ancestry which has joined the real world in understanding that customer inconvenience is the path to profits.
Why hasn’t she discontinued the account without the DNA results and switched to using the one with the results?
She could share her DNA results with her other account and access most of the information available to the main account that has the DNA attached.