Caution to geneaologists

[Paul]

I registered, uploaded information for my family tree and searched for around a week for any connections. There were absolutely none and I never found out anything new!
I closed my account... I'm not sure if the information is still on there, though.

That's terrible about same-sex partnerships also. You would expect them to update their system to allow such information as they are now a massive force in geneology.

[Detroitpete]

I have to say that I've been frustrated by Ancestry.com but perhaps its not their fault per se, its more about their wiki-structure. In my paternal lines almost ALL searches lead back to a book published in the late 1920's by those in previous generations of my family. The problem is that they were from one specfic 'wing' of the family and had a very sketchy, at best, idea of other parts of the family. Many of the 'facts' they published (despite having stated in the Prologue that much information was based memories or secondhand 'stories') have been repeated as 'fact' by more recent searchers of our family tree. It's much akin to the old telephone game where once something is stated, factual or not, it gets repeated as fact.

Just in my own research I have found conflicting information. Typically, one person cites their 'source' and most take it as vaid and run with it. Case in point, 4 generations prior to these authors, the male family head was said to have arrived to America from Sweden with only a probable assumption and vague time frame given. Further document research has shown that the individual in question was married in Scotland to a woman of Welsh decent in Scotland and THEN shows up in America. Simply repeating the 1920's information has lead to sloppy research and has been the most frustrating aspect of Ancestry.com I've experienced.

[NewEnglander]

I guess I learned a long time ago not to take the first thing I read as fact and to do additional research to make dang sure it's true. When I first started on Ancestry I was excited to find some pretty extensive branches of the family tree intact (on the One World Tree resource), but later research showed that some of the lines were very mixed up and in the end I deleted the information from my tree.
If you have ancestors from Canada, the census records available on Ancestry are incredible. I'm not sure if they're available elsewhere (they most likely are) but being able to easily search and download digital copies of a census from the 18th Century is just amazing.
Now if I could only somehow find out the names of my great-great-grandparents on my father's side.........(i've been stuck for years)

[thanmuwa]

I've had an awful experience with Ancestry.com.

Sad to hear that you are having such trouble. Is it a money issue (can your bank deal with it?) or a data protection issue? (might get a bit complicated, is it hosted in the EU, by an EU company? Data protection is fairly watertight here.)

Oh yeah, one other thing.... Website Gaywallet reports that they do not allow registration of same-sex partnerships in their family trees... You can read about it here; http://www.gaywallet.com/forum/topic...ms-response-to

I know it is very PC these days to treat every relationship equally but I'm afraid the biology is distinctly unfashionable. Only a man and a woman can have a baby together. As Ancestry.com replied, "genealogy trees are intended to trace biological relationships or bloodlines. As two persons of the same gender are unable to have biological children, they cannot be entered as spouses or partners."
No matter how trendy it is to treat everybody equally, putting a same sex partner, step-parent or adoptive parent into database intended to track genetic heritage is downright unhelpful and could have the effect of inventing genetic relationships that are just plain wrong. Put enough of them in and it will end up invalidating everyone else's hard work. This is in no way related to an individual's parenting skills, which seems to be the implication of your "gay wallet" website. And I say this as someone firmly in one of the categories I just mentioned.
At the end of the day, biology is biology, DNA is DNA, and no particular viewpoint, politically correct or not, will change the facts of how babies happen and who they are genetically related to.

[NewGuise]

The Ancestry.com site claims to give its users "access to historical records with information on over 6 billion people. These rich collections include photographs, memoirs, maps, census documents, family trees and detailed records about births, marriages, deaths, military service, immigration, land ownership and much more." Childless marriages and adoptions and much more can be and are recorded on Ancestry.com, so this is not (just) about biology...

[Tobus]

Childless marriages and adoptions and much more can be and are recorded on Ancestry.com, so this is not (just) about biology...

That's a good point. Ideally, any public record that can be used to trace people back to a certain place at a certain time will be useful in the future when our descendants are trying to put pieces together. And if a gay couple marries and adopts a child (or if one of them had a child before or after this relationship), they do a disservice to the records by not logging them. There will be a piece of the puzzle missing from a person's life that may make them hard to find later.

[Raphael]

eHarmony just settled a discrimination suit and Ancestry.com may need to the same thing soon.

[CDNSushi]

That's a good point. Ideally, any public record that can be used to trace people back to a certain place at a certain time will be useful in the future when our descendants are trying to put pieces together. And if a gay couple marries and adopts a child (or if one of them had a child before or after this relationship), they do a disservice to the records by not logging them. There will be a piece of the puzzle missing from a person's life that may make them hard to find later.

Exactly. I am not gay, and my own opinions about gay marriage and adoption are just that -- MY OWN. But a geneology service should be in the business of reporting and recording family trees, not mandating what they should or shouldn't look like...

ith:

BTW, as an update -- I got a response back to my sharply worded PFO letter/threat within the 48 hour window I gave them. They didn't address my concern 100%, but at least enough that they told me my account would be deleted but it would take up to a week or more to do so. (Part 2 of my concern was removal of any family info I input into their system. I don't want that to be available to them or anyone else using their service)... But once my account is deleted it should be easy enough to do a quick "check" to see if all the data I put in was deleted as well.

[Tobus]

Part 2 of my concern was removal of any family info I input into their system. I don't want that to be available to them or anyone else using their service

If you put in personal information that's not part of the public record, I can understand your desire to have it removed. But if it's part of the public record (like marriages, births, deaths, etc.), there may be a legal precedent for them to keep it on there. I'm no lawyer, so I'm just guessing.

[macwilkin]

If you put in personal information that's not part of the public record, I can understand your desire to have it removed. But if it's part of the public record (like marriages, births, deaths, etc.), there may be a legal precedent for them to keep it on there. I'm no lawyer, so I'm just guessing.

Not only that, but it's also a bit "unsportsmanlike" among the genealogical community to deliberately withold information from others. I've known people who have denied access to public records in their possession simply for spite, and many a researcher couldn't use those sources in their research.

You may have a beef with ancestry, fair enough, but do you have a beef with all of its users enough to hurt someone in their efforts to trace their ancestry?

T.