After over a decade using Ancestry.com, I finally decided to break off my relationship. There are many reasons that I finally gave up in favor of utilizing other resources, and none were really the be-all-end-all.
1. I research sporadically.
There might be a few months time where I am not able to sit and research actively on the site. With a child, husband, pets, etc. I just do not always have the time to regularly research. Because of this, I cannot see paying a monthly subscription (as of this writing it was $40 for six months or $20 for one month) that may or may not get used. Especially when that $20 could be quarters for the laundromat.
2. Once you have paid for access to a document, you do not retain access to it once membership lapses.
How awesome is it to have access to your great grandparent’s birth certificates or death certificates? Then once six months is up, you no longer have access to these files on their website unless your membership becomes active. This was probably the biggest issue for my situation. I have a few thousand people in my tree and with some of the individuals, I have really struggled with finding their associated records. Having them suddenly yanked from me once my paid membership is up was unexpected. It left me in no better of a position with my research than before I had paid for a membership as I did not download all the documents the first time I had access to them. I know better now!
This being said, you can certainly download them to your own computer to have a personal copy. However, if you then try to only use your personal media rather than Ancestry’s media to circumvent this issue, it will always give you “hints” for life events for which you already have the media. See below for my hangup with their "hint" system.
3. Duplicated efforts.
Site wide, you will run into the same person in multiple family trees. Users will often share their trees with you, allowing you to see what their research looks like. Often times, the information is not substantiated with any sort of documentation or has been copied from other trees that were in turn copied from another tree.
4. Privacy
After finding a long-lost branch of the family on the Ancestry.com message boards, I passed on information about living individuals, with their permission, via email correspondence under the assumption that it was private and would be beneficial in getting two close relatives in touch with one another. I was shocked and saddened when this person breached my trust by posting the information to public forums, including the town I was currently living in and my child’s name and age. While using another website will not protect me from this type of issue, using a website the automatically hides living individuals does cut down on this significantly.
5. Hints
Ancestry is known for their shaking leaf signal on individual profiles to indicate that a 'hint' has been found for you by their system. These could be anything from actual census or school records, which are incredibly helpful, to a photocopy of a receipt that another user uploaded and tagged incorrectly, which is not helpful at all. Also not helpful are the proliferation of separate trees within Ancestry. Because everyone keeps their own tree, so much inaccurate information is collected for these shared ancestors. With Ancestry pushing these often times inaccurate trees as 'hints' to others, many users think this information is verified by Ancestry -- which is not the case at all.
As I said earlier, there are many reasons I gave up my paid subscription to Ancestry. This is not to say that I do not still use their resources. From my local library card, I am able to access Ancestry Library which does circumvent some of the above-mentioned problems.
My biggest hang-up with Ancestry revolves around the fact that much of the material they offer via paid subscription can be found elsewhere.
Ancestry was a great start for me, but with the increasing availability of resources, it is rapidly becoming an outdated method for conducting basic genealogical research.
What are your thoughts on paid services? Where do they fit into your research?
- Patricia
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
