Comments on: Ancestry.com, bad practice or just shrewd?

By: sarahk

sarahk — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 00:47:39 +0000

Thanks Tawny, I must check them out, but in this instance I didn’t part with my $$$

By: Tawny

Tawny — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 21:59:41 +0000

Call or go online to the Better Business Bureau and put in a complaint. You will get your money
back after quite a bit of time. I did this with another company. Works really well.

Hope it works for you.

By: Waneta Arner

Waneta Arner — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 22:16:59 +0000

I joined Ancestry some years ago when they offered the membership for something like $6.95 monthly. Since that time they have jumped in price, and I felt I could no longer afford it [especially with a disabling illness and cost of monthly medicine, etc.]

Some representative called me in 2004 and told me my subscription was expiring in near future and I told him I didn’t want to ‘re-up’ a subscription. He asked if he could call again in a couple of months and see if I’d changed my mind. I told him there was no need to call again, that I wouldn’t be changing my mind.

Well, the outfit charged my credit card anyway and after a call to Ancestry, I thought they’d removed the charge [on husband's acct.] as I was never allowed to research Ancestry as before.

Then just this June 26, 2005, they charged our acct. with another year’s subscription. After a call and some screaming, I was able to get a representative to agree to a reimbursement.

Since she told me my subscription had ended in June of 2005 from when I renewed in 2004 I looked up my old charge acct records. Lo and behold they never credited my acct. last year.

I spoke with a rep at Ancestry this morning and they say they won’t refund the money. They could tell I hadn’t used [couldn't get on] the outfit and say that I was trying to get on by using the wrong pass word. She said she’d reached my acct. just this morning by using the correct password. [I am not even offered the area where one can sign on.]

When I do reach the Ancestry web site, I am deemed a registered guest… no more… no less. My advice to anyone thinking of subscribing to ancestry is to research their reputation.

I was even told that the young man who called in 2004 had no authority to either re-new, or close my account. Goodness, then why do they have anyone making the calls?

Crazy outfit is all I can say.

By: dr

dr — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 02:05:46 +0000

I became a member of ancestry.com early on before it became what it is. Most of the search engines(around 1998) were free then. Most of ancestry’s data was also free. Then they started asking for membership fees. Ok, I did this ($200. annual) under the assumption one could access all databases since it was the best membership. Not true, for UK records, there is an additional fee involved. Hello, almost all americans are immigrated from somewhere–mine was from the UK.Also, their newspaper database sucks. It does not access all newspapers and sometimes when you put in a name it will give you part of the name in a word? Such as Seum–it came up with museum.A great many of the genealogy sites that were once free are now linked directly to ancestry–it is a monoploy of sorts. I have been doing this for eight years (still a newbie), but you can rarely access census or anything without somehow turning up on ancestry once again, who wants a fee of course. So all the sites that claim”free” are but only for 14 days. Its a misconception. I have since been travelling around ancestry.com as much as possible.