Ancestry Reviews

Overprice and useless. The membership automatically gets renewed each month. You pay to do your own work. Be aware and save yourself tome/money.

I have been a client of Ancestry. Com for over 6 years and have put extensive research into my family tree.
I traced seven great-grandparent's lines as far back as the 12th and 13th centuries, made numerous discoveries for research articles that I am working on in my family tree, including being a Mayflower descendant. Many of the ancestors are historic and had attached numerous documents and citations to their profiles which have been eliminated without my knowledge. I have all the documentation for this.
I began receiving emails a few months ago saying that this person had been added to my tree, or hints of people to add. Firstly, I did not add them and no one else has access to my account. Secondly, the people they were suggesting were great-grandparents that were added years ago when I first began. At this point I logged into my account many errors, broken family lines and the only help was from their FAQ saying the basic when you delete a person the tree is broken, go back and add manually. I have never deleted anyone to cause this to happen. I am up for renewal in a few weeks and noticed that portions of the tree were missing, which means I cannot download it to take to another company.
I went onto their chat helpline and I was given misinformation . I am sure I am not the only one this is happening to. To further illustrate, the suggestions were to input the information again manually, which means renewing and basically starting over for the next year or longer. I spoke to a CS agent and she said that she would tape our conversation and tag my account for a review, and that never happened.
The responses are not specific, they sent out emails that are genealogy 101 and very generic.
Ancestry, like other genealogy companies, advertises that you can download a GEDCOM file of your tree. The agent assured me that the entire tree would download, but that is not the case. Only a small portion that is on the screen is visible. There are numerous other glitches in their software that ultimately ends up costing the consumer time that they will never recover and dollars.
Many features on the site say" not available at this time " or an error has occurred.
The most bizarre change occurred recently when I noticed all of my relations were referred to as step ie. uncle, mother ect. The system, software, or someone had added my father as a spouse to my grandmother. As I mentioned, they were added correctly years ago correctly, and I have never changed anything.
I will not renew with them, and I am printing out and trying to recover as much as I can . For comparison I took screenshots and made printouts today and compared them with one of my completed lines that I made a record of in 2020.
There's lots of that false advertising when it comes to ancestry.com. I had the DNA done and the information keeps changing in regard to heredity. I am curious to see how many other consumer complaints are out there in regard to this company.
With all the uncertainty this year, I want to leave this for my grandchildren and it was complete but now it is a mess. I see a lot of work ahead to undo the damage. The years of time and expense is basically wasted. I would like to know how many other customers are having problems.I saw where there is a class action lawsuit in the works against them. I hope that the negative reviews and other actions will prompt some refunds and also they will take care of their software issues.
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User's recommendation: Go with another company and create your family tree offline.

There are sites that I like better and prefer to use

I was somewhat misled with respect to subscription method and rolling application.
I drew ancestry's attention to my concerns and they provided a fair solution. For this reason I found ancestry
and their associates helpful , professional, and importantly the 'listened' to my concerns .They therefore deserve a 5 star rating.
bill taylor
24/05/2021
22.00 hrs.

Wonderful woman, helpful, friendly, understanding. Wonderful listener, solved my problem.

They have quite a scam going on here. I signed up for the free trial period and cancelled before it ended. Ancestry continued to charge my credit card. When I called for a refund they claimed that since it was a recurring charge they could not refund my money which is bullsh*t.

If you want to use this service check with your local library. They most likely allow you to access it for free. You've already paid for it with your taxes, don't give these rip-off artist any more money.

I don't know the higher upps and really don't trust them ???? ! And don't want to give THEM ANY $ .
BUT THE FRONT LINE/PHONE REPRESENTATIVES , I DO ???? !

I cancelled my monthly NON-SUBSCRIPTION in February 2021 only to discover they were still taking it out in April 2021. The website and customer service have been painstakingly researched and refined to NEVER allow a customer out of the payments. I re-cancelled (which is like a maze of pages on purpose to foul you up-are you sure you want to cancel? Are you positive? Really... click, click, click) anyway on 4/29 and logged back in only to find it still set to monthly "pay as you go". I called the customer service and was told "Ohhhhhhh we can't cancel unless your husband calls too." Then I said I wanted my credit card info removed and was told "No ma'am we need your husband to call also". I had to call my bank and cancel my card and do a charge back for unauthorized charges. If it is worth all that headache to you good luck and God Bless.

I signed up for the trial and cancelled prior to the required date, but was charged anyway. Since I had used a debit card I rarely use, the charges were not caught right away. Once I called them, they stated they would issue a partial refund. That was a couple months ago, 6-7 phone calls, a bogus statement that the refund was issued on 3/12. You can't talk with anyone of authority, you can't get answers. In fact one of their representatives stated I should dispute the refund with my bank. Of course, my bank doesn't dispute credits owed, or charges older than 2 months. I'm pretty sure she knew this. I will NEVER recommend Ancestry.com. Their business practices are terrible.

DO NOT USE THIS SERVICE. THEY ARE A VERY DISHONEST COMPANY. As others are beginning to pop up on here stating that they sent their samples in in December and January only to find out THIS WEEK that the sample they’ve been processing for MONTHS is now unusable and click the link for a replacement kit only to find out that now we are outside the Ancestry Health window for submission. Excuse me? We sent it in months ago. MONTHS AGO. Now their lab destroyed the sample somehow and we can’t get the health results. This is a LIE. They just want to end the processing of Health effective immediately. They received our sample in January. And just now they are saying the sample isn’t usable? LIE. A good, honest, and reputable company would allow these individuals to resubmit a sample and they’d push it to the front of the line for the tests that were ordered and paid for - Ancestry Health. HORRIBLE EXPERIENCE. HORRIBLE COMPANY. HORRIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE. DISHONEST.

The customer service rep was professional, listened to me and assured me that she heard me, because she repeated my words back to me. She was also very knowledgeable and took care of my situation.

I and 2 cousins did research in 1700 to 1900s old, handwritten Norwegian parish books, as well as Norwegian country records from various counties and towns. I have spent decades on my family tree and researched within handwritten Norwegian records dating back to 1700s. I have spent $1000s on 4 DNA tests and 12 years of Ancestry subscriptions. Now they have deleted messages with other Ancestry members, with no notice. Unless I pay for the International Subscription, I cannot access data I download from the original sources. They do not keep the links from the original sources and turn them into HTML Ancestry files and not original jpgs. So you save the link to Ancestry, not the original document you researched. Remember you are paying them high subscription prices to do data base entry for their company. They don't pay you, you pay them to enter your family's information which was hacked in 2017. They only care for profit, not you as a customer. Go to another site where the information is not charged extra. Don't build your tree on Ancestry, you have no control over it. Download the data and make a tree offline. And don't use Family Tree Builder. It is no longer supported.