AncestryReviews 635

Ancestry is ripping off the DNA members. They arbitrarily debit their monthly fee, often several times.
Furthermore, you no longer have an overview of DNA matches if you do not use the payment service.
Third, they are constantly changing their policy while the company - bought by Goldmann Sachs - is generating profit with my DNA.

Ancestry have a monopoly on the market. False advertising - I recently got a subscription to all Australian and UK records. Except it's not all the records - it excludes Newspapers and other databases.
Poor service and very expensive, especially considering you give them the content.

My review makes about at much sense as the headline. Twice I've sent my spit into ancestry.com. Twice I've waited for the results only to be told they couldn't give me any results. I'd be fine with that normally. If I sent my spit to you and asked you to tell me where I came from and you said you had no idea and stop sending me your spit I'd understand, but ancestry.com keeps asking me to pay them to send my spit to them and then they take months to figure out nothing. Don't get my hopes up is all I'm asking. Now my uncle did the spit test and he loved it so I know sometimes they can tell you if you're from Norway or China but I keep spitting and waiting and I'm upset that they treat me like I'm not a human or something.

If I could rate zero I would. I missed cancelling the free trial cut off by 12 hours and the unhelpful customer service agent "Joe" told me there was nothing he could do about it.

It is clearly a strategy hoping people will forget to cancel to make money. You don't just pay for 1 month, you get the luxury of paying for 6 months = £69.

Obviously Joe denies the company uses this strategy, however if that wasn't the case why wouldn't they refund the money...

I didn't want to continue using the website as I found it to be completely unintuitive.

Horrible customer service, the service itself is not even close to worth 40$ a month. It's a ridiculous setup hard to navigate and the hints after the first one are mostly the exact same material from different places I don't need to know the same thing 20 times. Not user friendly, and the free trial has no notification so don't expect to be warned other then in reviews.

I got no where with my trial, canceled my account and they still charged me. They refused to give a refund, complete scam, do not use.

I signed up for monthly payments with ancestry. I was told that the amount would not change sand at the end of 6 months I could continue the membership or drop it at no charge. At the end of 6 months, I cancelled my membership. They charged me $25 plus tax to end my membership although I had paid for 6 months and so had fulfilled the contract. Probably need to stay away from them.

The service failed miserably to obtain documents pertaining to my mother and father and my mother's parents and siblings. It is an utter waste of money. Atop of that, they charged $25 to cancel their horrible service.

If you are AFRICAN American, do not use this site. I am sorry that certain Afri an Americans are promoting this company. They are using slavery to profit with lies and inaccurate DNA testing. I attempted to cancel my account only to find that they were still charging me 79.99 months later. In my opinion go to Mormon site, it is free and you will find actual records. Ancestry should be sued in a class action suit, in my opinion. Let's get that started.

I signed up for a free trial, and then canceled my membership the same day. I was charged after 2 weeks and somehow my membership was active again. I smoke to a representative that told me I could not get a refund.

PayPal gave me one, so sucks for them I guess! :)

Be careful, after some digging I found out they do this to a lot of people.

I am a 14-year member of Ancestry. Since the Blackstone Group has taken over the dependability and speed have sharply decreased Many of the new "additions and improvements" do not work properly. Like a lot of companies that are bought out by big business it is the $ that is important not the customer.

I use to love ancestry.com and have been a subscriber for many years but this is my last subscription renewal. Since the last OS update on Safari, I have been unable to open records that I access through the leaf clue on Family Tree Maker. I have contacted Ancestry.com and they told me to use Google Chrome. It is a lot more trouble research that way so I will not renew. I guess Ancestry does not care if they lose subscribers. The picture below shows what happens when I click on a document e.g. census record.

Do NOT get a free trial with your purchase of a DNA kit. It will renew and you will NOT get a refund. Who the hell pays $80 for a three month subscription? It's $#*!ing ridiculous. I might as well just thrown that in the trash.

Garbage. Pay for what? DNA... ok fine. Look, I'm 42% whatever; who the hell is my Fathers Mother? Nothing? WTF did I just pay for?

If I could give it a no star I would. They are so $#*!ty with customer service that I would be ashamed to run a business this way.

I found the site to be a bit cumbersome and hard to use. Multiple times when I clicked a hint leaf it would take me to another outside site that wanted yet another fee to access the data. I was shocked that they had the audacity to charge $25 to cancel my membership. I won't be going back nor do I recommend this site at all.

I did the Ancestry DNA a few years back. I recently paid for a 6 month membership and suddenly I can't see any Common ancestors to my matches and can't see my thrulines and it wants to charge me extra for newspaper clippings. As if that's not frustrating enough, I spoke to two different people on the chat help line and one person on the phone. None of them have a clue how to fix it!

Got a Free Trial - They billed me 37$ then when I cancelled it (Same Day within minutes) they then billed me 25.00 to cancel it - RIP OFF Predatory Con men - DO NOT USE THEM

I have been doing genealogy research since 1988. Ancestry began as a publisher of genealogy books and magazines. Over the decades, I have watched Ancestry.com buy up and put out of business many online websites you could previously access for FREE. Once Ancestry got their hands on them they began jacking up their subscription rates. Here are just a few of the great sites they stole from the public: Family Treemaker, Rootsweb, Fold3, Newspapers.com, and FindaGrave.com (you can still actually access findagrave but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they take that one away also). They even took my library's access away... I can only guess that the library could no longer afford their exorbitant rates. I will never give them a dime of my money. Thank goodness there are still some honest, reputable non-profit sites available for research (as of May, 2022).