After signing up with ancestry.com for their two week free trial, I was anxious to find some things about my family that I didn't have, or didn't know. Being the matron of my family now, I have no one older than me to ask any questions, or hear their stories, or see their pictures that I've never seen. So it goes without saying, that when I began to see pictures of people that I'd never seen before, and documents dating back 150 plus years of my family, etc, naturally I couldn't seem to get enough. Sadly, I let the 14th Day of the two week free trial slip up on me, and failed to cancel my subscription first thing the morning of that day. I had to stop what I was doing on my phone to attend to the 12, yes I said TWELVE, BACK to BACK attempts to debit my account, as I was receiving messages from my bank. Furthermore, the bank requested that I order a new card, which I just recently was forced to do only two months prior, due to similar circumstances. Further adding to the stress of the day, this has now cost me 7 days of making any purchases, unless I do so with Google pay, of which I'm quite unfamiliar with as of yet. My experience on both ancestry.com, and newspapers.com, their sister company, have been the most stressful, and for a Time (2 weeks to be exact), blissfully informative experiences online that I've ever had. Not only did they completely bombard, and further ruin my morning, but all of the work that I have been doing for 2 weeks, along with all my families pictures, and very precious details, are forever being held hostage by ancestry.com. And, unbeknownst to me, existed a newspapers.com, that was suddenly attempting to charge my account, as well, before all of this. Ironically, they were / are also a part of ancestry.com, although I should have seen the similarities. Most importantly, I would like to know exactly how one website is able to monopolize everyone's heritage, while charging outrageous prices, in turn, for anyone to obtain, regain, or retain their families most PRIVATE AND PERSONAL information?! Thankfully, I'm able to be proactive, and in preparation for this day, I took screenshots of every picture and if each document that I felt was important to myself, and my family, the precious few family members I've got left. And now, if my two daughters, one brother, or grandson, want to see any of our family information in the future, other than what I was able to salvage in those two weeks and have saved on my phone, they're going to be forced to pay dearly, and monthly at that, or annually however. This is the most outrageous scam / hoax, the biggest infringement on a family's copyright, and for me the biggest Injustice that has ever been done to me to date. I would like to know how they think they have any right to be the only ones in the entire world that are able to access all information about my family, and countless others, when none of us will ever even know any one of their names responsible for stealing, and virtually holding hostage, that of all of our family's heritages?!

One can make one's own tree, without interference, but there are many places and ways to do that. What about that advantage of gleaning info from other Ancestry trees? Sadly, from the perspective of a careful researcher, many, if not most, of the family trees at ancestry have terrible flaws that then proliferate when other researchers grab tree info without verifying it. For example, at the behest of a cousin, I looked through overseas records (not available at ancestry) for his great-grandfather's record. I did locate it, based on an perfectly matching birth date and birth village in a newly available US record and a Czech record. Unfortunately, some one with a similar family at ancestry had tracked a person with the same name and the same birth year in Czechia back generations. Over 40 persons at ancestry copied all that info to their own family tree, making it seem a certainly. The problem: the birth record for that "same named" putative ancestor had an annotation on it that he died in infancy. There was also a detailed and official death record for that infant. One of my cousins had even visited that birthplace as a consequence-but it was, of course, not the village where his great grandfather was born.

This is just one example. I personally know dozens, if not hundreds. So all those other trees available for your inspection are not necessarily much of a resource. You need to be cautious and view sources in other trees thoughtfully if not critically, or your own tree may become a fairy tale, to put it mildly. Just because "bare info" with a name and a date has been entered into dozens of trees does not mean it is correct. Part of the reason I started genealogical research was due to multiple records online about myself that had my parents wrong, with no sources to inspect.

Another increasing flaw with ancestry is that, more and more, it offers indexes of records with nothing more, as opposed to indexes of records linked to an image of the original (but often not the right image.) If your surname is not as easy as "Smith", you may not be able to check if the record could belong to your ancestor if there's no original to view. And you'll have the same problem if the supposed link to the actual image doesn't link to it. Between those two problems, it took me 5 years of off and on searching to find my great grandparent's immigration record. It was poorly indexed, and pages away from the image to which it was linked.

Another very recent and more troubling development: ancestry has made it impossible to copy writing in the "facts" section. There was no advance warning given. So if you have written text in there, with perhaps a URL in it, you cannot quickly copy it for your own records. That for me is a final straw; I do a fair amount of translating from Czech into English and don't relish either having to translate records again or having to copy my own translations.

Worse yet, that now makes me fear "what" ancestry.com could change next. Will it also become impossible to retrieve records and photographs I personally added to their website, even if I do carry a subscription? So ancestry is now the "last place" I will go to enter info, as I'd better store it elsewhere to be sure of recovering it. It's not a bad place to visit to look around for new info before verifying it, but I wouldn't want to park my genealogical records there.

4 Altered DNA results, test, always changing, its like they mix(everyone's) all DNA together, Cheap too good to be true. Birth certificate are not my parents. Commercial to make people think for a cheap price you'll get results when its really to make ancestry look good. I feel sorry for all general cultures, history who have dropped, given up their heritage thinking these results are correct when its not correct from Ancestry. Get a real DNA test! 3 nations only Ancestry will minimize, seperating all cultures into 3. Incorrect BLACK & SLAVE? That's it huh? You ALLOW YOUR STAFF TO SAY THAT TO CUSTOMERS BUT FOR CERTAIN AFRICAN ANCESTRY TO BUILD YOUR POPULARITY, ADS, COMMERCIALS, CELEBS, CERTAIN AFRICAN ANCESTRY CUSTOMERS YOU GIVE THEM THE CORRECT ANCESTRY SHOWING THEM FOR A LOW PRICE WALKING IN HALLWAYS, DISPLAYS & photos? Incorrect! What year is this, I am A free woman, slavery has not been here for 100's of years. That's all my ancestors did walk around in chains the end nothing before, nothing after?
I know my Foster parents(evil & will not tell the truth) are not parents(never adopted no legal records), birth certificate parents(that guy is crazy as a horse, has 1 evil bad intentions & will not tell the truth) are not my parents, kids not adopted, lived in a, b, c, d does not mean, born "slave, Black". Incorrect! I Know in my heart who my parents are! I cannot deny my mother or father when I look in the mirror! FIRST OF ALL MY DAUGHTER, I ARE HISPANIC, MIXED= TRUST, BELIEVE WHEN I SAY ANCESTRY IS SO BELOW BAD & DOES NOT Give any answers. NO matter what background or culture Don't deny, don't drop your heritage, look to your elders, photos, records, find the truth, with a real DNA test. Don't deny your hispanic ancestry. Don't deny your european ancestry. Don't deny African ancestry. Etc meaning no matter what background. Mixed don't deny who you are. Celebrate who you are. YOU CAN FIND THE ANSWERS ON YOUR OWN of your ancestry. Ancestry will be like a smack in the face,(as they stated)insults(breaking, messing with families, 100's of beautiful cultures all over the world ancestry will mess with, denial and doubt, minimizing culture and will lower you, your thoughts to the ground. Ancestry are like a psychic hotline for answers you already know(provided to them) or will have you doubt you, alter, wrong answers, pairing you with people that when you chat, talk guess what with*get* a real DNA test not a match, fake photos, robotic chats to make you think you are connecting to a real unknown relative, denial of your family, all that you grew up with when it comes to positive heritage, family.

I contacted Mr Elliot to get help with my account, My name is Shelia Coleman i have one of the most common names in the WORLD. ELLIOT the man with the attitude gave me such a hard time, he mispelled my name multiple times on purpose laughing in the backround.

He obviously feels wasting my time is halarious. I them told him to just tell me to send me to another representative and he not only refused me, he told me that IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO CONTACT ANYONE ELSE! So he is the only employee representative at ancestry.

I will tell you right now i am so done with ancestry.com i have referred so many people to this business, MY COMPANY after all i am related to quite a few historical afircan americans.

Your company needs a customer support section from what i see you do not even care for your customers to have such a thing. No wonder your employees were rude, because there is no CONSEQUENCES involved for them.

I have my own company myself and my employees would NEVER be so rude and inconsiderate

This suggestion box is nothing, i will most certainly be writing a copy letter to corprate office because this suggestion box is Nothing.

P.S. THEY CHARGED MY BANK $25 WHEN I CANCELLED I AM DISPUTING IT WITH MY BANK RIGHT NOW WHEN THEY CHARGE YOU MAKE SURE YOU DISPUTE IT WITH YOUR BANK.

If your using paypal, decline the recurring payments THEN CANCEL. Beware all, dont get scammed from these frauds.

MY NAME I S LARRY FODDRILL, WHERE ARE MY DNA RESULTS? ( 2 OF THEM, MINE AND MY SISTERS. YOU GUYS ARE WAY OVERDUE.

I read through many of the comments and see lots of self-inflicted wounds. Some comments are hilarious. I've been using Ancestry since 2010 and I've used it extensively to create five trees. I started off using the two-week free trial. I now use it for one month at a time. Sure, I'm required to signup for a longer period but I mark my calendar and cancel online before the automatic renewal. I've never had a problem except once and then I called in to make the cancellation. A BIG hint folks: you can still access and update your trees even when you're not paying. You just lose access to the databases but a work-around is to use FamilySearch and Google which is free. I sign up with Ancestry once or twice a year as my schedule permits and use it for a single month at a time. During that month I do extensive work and research. The greatest benefit is Ancestry's extensive research library and databases. I also like the fact I can work on my trees even when I'm not paying. Beyond that there are problems. (1) Like many, I don't care for the new format but I've gotten used to it and can move around quickly when the site is not bogged down. I noticed some say when the change from the old format to new took place they lost information or it was changed. I don't understand that, I have thousands of people on my trees and nothing was lost nor changed. Having spent hundreds of hours on Ancestry I know some users do not property format dates nor places so that may be the problem. Ancestry has never changed any of my records or trees; the new format adjusted the presentation but not the records (2) Ancestry's search engine is a puzzle - the results at times make no sense, in short - I hate their search engine. HINT: When you do find a valid hint record and open it look along the right and you will see "Suggested Records - those tend to be credible and apply to the person you're researching. (3) Ancestry users tend to be cut and paste types meaning they pay no attention to the validity of the data thus many family trees are crap and should never be trusted as "factual". Some errors are so blatant you wonder how the person ever made the initial input didn't catch it but its, garbage in, garbage out. Example: very common to see parents too young to give birth or born AFTER their children. Lots of "huh? And those errors are repeated over and over. On that same note if you're posting pictures, documents etc, ensure you provide your source. I've seen the same picture for "Joe Smith" posted on Joe Smith's of varying age and location. Ancestry throws it up as a hint and users snap it up because there's no way to figure out it the Joe Smith is of your lineage or not. I've posted lots of pictures and I always provide an approximate date if one is not given, location, and identify the person(s) in the photo and any notation on the back of the photo. (4) Some Ancestry resources like: US and International Marriage Records, Millenium File and Family Records cannot be trusted. Use as a last resort. Find-A-Grave is also full of errors.

DNA - if you're doing the dna feature read the instructions carefully because there are multiple things to do. Once you get your kit you have to register it before you send it back for processing. And remember, you might think you know your ethnic background but dna is a different animal. Dna varies among children of the same family. My father's side is solid German and my mother mostly British. I'm 79% British by dna. My dad's German side doesn't make me 50% German in dna terms. Readup on dna for explanations. And in case you're wondering my dna test does validate ancestors (1st and 3rd cousins) on both my father and mothers side so I know who my parents are. Immediate family and first thru third cousins are the only really valid dna matchs. The rest is meaningless at this point although in the future it will help validate family matching.

BTW, I'm 63, male, am not a member of LDS nor associated with Ancestry. Just a regular guy who enjoys "serious" ancestry research as a hobby.

I was very new to family research in 2014, and pleasantly surprised at the vast amount of records available at Ancestry. These official records from Government agencies, parish records + more seemed to back up what I knew, and some records corrected family misinformation.

I even had a very heart warminmg success when my hairdresser casually told me about a relative who had been killed age 24 and she had brought up his little girl, now an adult. With just his name and city of birth I was able to trace his family, and she has now found her grandmother (who never knew about her granddaughter). Tough to argue with those kind of results.

And very positive results in tracing cousins ancestry. Of especial interest has been the Departure/Arrival information from National Archives, showing overseas travel. I located a 2nd cousin of my late father and he never knew we existed. I visited him just in time, he passed away 3 months after that. I wouldn't have found him without this information. Other family relatives are excited to see journeys that their parents made with themselves as infants

However, Other members public trees were a very different picture. I found other trees that had very incorrect information about my family. Some even had cousins that didn't exist (they were children of other couples who had same surnames, not even same first name). Many other public trees has wrong dates (off by years). I even went to the trouble of acquiring their birth certificates and putting that family in my tree (but disconnected from my family) so others could find it and see the errors. There needs to be a way to dispute incorrect information in other public trees, or a way to only allow validated portions of trees to be public.,

There is value is seeing other peoples trees, but there needs to be some sort of "rating" system to indicate relative quality/accuracy before other people just copy rubbish and make more rubbish.

This is very much a feature of today's world: "DisInformation". It really is troublesome to see so much rubbish, and makes it extremely hard to filter the good from the bad. I know feel the need to completely review all of my tree information that has been gleaned from other trees. Colour coding to separate an official record from a public tree would be useful (as some competitive tools allow). Be very careful with public trees. I now consider them almost 100% speculation. Just last week I was researching an ancestor from teh 1700'as and found a large group of people with the same info. Hmm. 'Strength in numbers?" NO. "fools never differ". They were all from another country, and had all keyed on someone who has exact same name but very different parts pf the country. There was a lone person who like me, just has a little bit of info. So the 2 of us (<10%) appears to have valid info, and 90% have rubbish. People act foolishly in crowds, and this is what Ancestry appears to be morphing into: A pool of rubbish driven by crowd instinct (and corporate greed), rather than a serious genealogical tool.

The DNA aspect is also questionable. I can trace my heritage to UK (87% UK, 13% Irish). Ancestry suggest that I am 22% Scandinavian (they got the 13% Irish correct)., Hmm. I suppose if you include the Vikings then everyone in UK is 22%. So I think that their sample/reference database is in error. I consider Ancestry DNA a waste of money, and just a gimmick. They may have scientific machinery performing tests, but they are making too much of a "leap of faith" in their assertions. I have taken other DNA tests (Family Tree and 23nad ME and find the FamilyTree research to be most effective, and better use of my money).

The clincher came with this new look and feel of their website. It is plain ugly. It is now harder (takes longer) to achieve tasks, Many more clicks, can no longer hover to get results). The insertion of arbitrary "this world event was going on at the same time" in the timeline is very annoying. I think this was built by folks who see the future as 100% tablets/touch screen oriented, and are excited by electronic toys.

The New Maybe/Undecided hints, while initially seeming useful, really isn't There is no way to search and find all the people that you have with Undecided hints. You have to look at each person individually to see if they have such hints once you have indicated Maybe. There is no way to search/find all the people that you have marked as Maybe.

There is no concept of backward compatibility, a concept poorly understood by new software developers (I have developed software for decades, even on these new tinker toy computers). They seem to think that changing something that has impact on customers is perfectly acceptable. New functionality is welcome, but provide it via new options that the user can activate/select when they are ready, not on a developers timetable,

Ancestry has lost me as a loyal customer. When my current subscription expires, I'm gone. Period. I'll come back when they pay me.

If you haven't yet signed up for Ancestry, don't bother. There are better places to waste your money.

First I want to say, I have nothing against change as long as it is good and works, some on other sites seem to think most of us are complaining because we are afraid of change. I was excited when I heard they were improving it and making some changes, until I first tried it last summer, I reverted back after giving it a month, because it was such a mess, they forced it on us December 15, no choice.

The death of Ancestry.com started when Permira Advisers LLP, bought it in 2012, it has been all down hill since then. It is now unusable as it has destroyed 15 years worth of work I have done since I joined the site in 2001. I have it on my FTM but unfortunately when I opened it up, it synced so now it is not accurate, I will have to revert back to my last backups. I have done a great deal of work in the short time since the last backup so all of that will be lost in order to get an accurate tree. Ancestry has now mixed up my photos which are now attached to the wrong people. Right now, you can't trust that the information in anyone's tree is accurate since so many things have been mixed up.

If you try to go back a page in your browser, you get an page not available error and you have to click on the session history list to get back to where you were. What used to take one click now takes 4 or 5 at least, a page that fit on your screen and was readable, now is the length of several pages. When you try to add photos of multiple ancestors, to all of them you have to first go to the page of the photo, click details which expands the page so that you have to scroll down using 2 different scroll bars, then click add, which brings up your trees, you type in the name, when it starts bringing up the list of possibilities after you type in the first name, the whole page jumps, and un-selects the box you were typing in, if you keep trying to type it assigns the photo to someone in the list, not the one you want, you have to be very careful and still I ended up having to delete and try again multiple times on most photos I was trying to assign, it used to be you were on the photo page, clicked the button add button next to the photo (no scrolling required) it brought up the box to select which tree, you put in the name and the list came up, no jumping of the page and it was easy to select. The new details arrow is a shaded area at the bottom of the page that covers about 1-2 inches of the screen, if your photo etc. takes up the area, the bottom part is unreadable. The whole thing is a mess and unusable. If they set out to destroy the best ancestry site, they have succeeded. They had a survey up but the page now says sorry this survey is no longer active. It had a sliding bar on how much you like the new Ancestry, I am guessing they got tired of seeing responses that said 0%.

IT SUCKS! I want the old ancestry back!

They took a iPhone app that allowed one to easily tag and add pictures to tree and turned it into a garbled mess of an app that takes forever and has all these ridiculous extras steps to load things. The graphic design is ugly and I hate the the dark brooding depressing back ground, it's like you just arrived at the dark web not a genealogy site. The back ground on it that has me looking at my dirty phone screen and its hard to read the writing on that background. The green and white interface was much better. Seriously I hate everything about this app. You should open and be able to tag and lay down a description immediately and upload quickly not go through 6 steps. I used to open iPhot and in under a second a half load a photo. Now I have to log into Ancestry each time, wait for that screen to clear that takes 2 seconds, click on the Ancesty icon wait 3-4 seconds, hit next, tap on tag photo, then tap on image, tap on find someone, then type in the entire full name and often the middle name as well s the thing never works the way the old app worked where John brought all the Johns, then punch an surname initial. Now I have to look at the whole list and then click on John Smith. That just idiotic that you have to go through all of those screen changes to add a photo. The number 1 function should have been to make ease in uploading photos, not editing them that should have been a secondary function tucked under quick upload for those who want to do that. They made such a big deal of this photo gimmick thing. It's what we all have on our phones already. So they too an app I loved and ruined it for something I already have an use on my phone?

This design team seems to love designing things in constricted letter box style with dark brooding colors and lots of constriction viewership fields. What they have done with the messaging system is just as bad s this. Your previous message to the other user is barely visible, you can only view, no more than a few words of it at a time, rather than the full message. The box you are typing in in small and narrow so you have no idea how the paragraph will look once it translated to full view.

I constantly pray that the company will sell and they will clean house and get a good team back in who knows how to create a site with ease of use again. These new features look like they have been designed for a video game portal rather than a site for grown up. Terrible design, confusing, ugly, complicated and unusable.