Ancestry.com has once again made a corporate business decision that emphasizes the ".com" at the expense of the "Ancestry" in the corporate title. The company announced in its official blog today that it will be limiting us to registering only one DNA kit to each membership account except in the case of minor children. The post was entitled "Enhancing Collaboration and Roles on DNA Results". Please read this before you order any DNA kits from AncestryDNA. Ancestry explains this change:
As the AncestryDNA service has grown, we are increasingly hearing about families taking DNA tests together. Family members want easier and more powerful ways to collaborate with each other to make discoveries in their family story, all while still maintaining control and privacy of their own information.A couple of years ago I blogged my thoughts about the appearance that Ancestry believed they always knew more about what we needed as genealogists than we knew ourselves. That post was entitled Does Ancestry think we are NOT OK? and can be read by clicking on this link.
Today's announcement indicates that Ancestry is at it again. The more than two dozen responses posted in the first hour were uniformly those of disappointed genealogists who still are looking for chromosome browsers. They were not looking for Ancestry to force everyone to have a separate Ancestry membership for each kit tested. Peggy Dalton Druck raised a number of other similar decisions over the years that also have seemed counter to the interests of genetic genealogists but perhaps Ancestry hopes they will be favorable to the bottom line of the company. She was kind enough to allow me to include her comments below:
I was going to order 3 more tests to have done in order to locate relationships within my family. I have been on Ancestry since 1997 and then full time since 2000.Every time you change something on ancestry it deletes a great deal off added things us researchers have added to the pages.I have one main tree and several other trees I research on.Now with this, it is ridiculous.I have stayed with ancestry all these years to prevent my research from being all over the internet.You sold off FTMaker and I can no longer use it for anything because of the last update they did to it messed my ancestry tree up so bad. You got rid of my fathers DNA from his Y 37 test and he is dead now and I can not use his dna numbers anywhere.You were not suppose to destroy dna in case someone wanted to to an upgrade like I wanted to do with my dad’s dna, but now his dead and you destroyed his DNA.Now you are doing this to all of us who have stuck by your company, helped to build the trees we have over all these years and now with our continuing work of verification with DNA you want to stripe us of all of our hard work we have done all these years.It appears that we will have to deal with even more "orphaned" accounts in the future as a result of Ancestry's implement of this requirement to pay for separate accounts in order to remain actively involved with one's DNA and the matches that are made. As several others commented on the Ancestry blog, many of those we want to test have no interest in or ability to setting up and maintaining separate accounts but would rather delegate this responsibility to the family genealogist. These are often the older family members whose autosomal DNA is most critical for us to collect and preserve.
Ancestry, I wish I had hope that you would listen to us this time.
I "manage" 5+ kits. I work on trees sporadically depending on hints. Not one of the people in manage would spend the amount of time i do checking and recheckimg documents and building trees. I do it for fun mostly, but recently a busy friend of mine asked me to admin his results. I have found his father!! This man wouldnt even know where to begin let alone spend the amount of time I did on it! I have built his tree to 300+ people dating back to the Mayflower. Ancestry - leave it alone!! It is working out just fine and providing a lot of people with the closure they are seeking!!! VJP
ReplyDeleteBut people keep buying.
ReplyDeleteIsrael, part of me hopes they still do. Those who are responding to the TV ads are not genetic genealogists and will continue to expand the numbers of people tested. On the other hand it is going to be increasingly hard to fit them in with no trees and very low response rates to queries. I hope for the best but ............
ReplyDeleteIf you have not read the supplemented blog post from Ancestry, (https://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/ ) you need to do so. It clarifies some issues and may not be as draconian as it originally appeared. Only time will tell. It is unfortunate that we often interpret Ancestry's decisions based on the history of prior corporate decisions.
ReplyDeleteAncestry says that no one will have to pay for a subscription account just to be tested. That will make this change more palatable.
Deletethey can not see the trees only their match--not their tree
DeleteUnless they have a paid subscription
Dave, There's no reason why the family genealogist cannot set up an AncestryDNA account on behalf of a relative under the new system. To my mind this is a good move and will stop any abuses of the system. See my blog post here: https://cruwys.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/an-update-to-ancestrydna-kit-management.html
ReplyDeleteNote too that the AncestryDNA Y-DNA and mtDNA samples have not been destroyed. The last I heard they were still trying to decide what to do with them. I got an official statement from Ancestry. See my blog post here:
https://cruwys.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-ancestry-y-dna-and-mtdna-samples.html
Well Debbie, you did better than me in a getting a reply. I've enquired about this issue at least five times – not one reply.
DeleteWhat about those that already have more than 1 tests attached to their account?
ReplyDeleteIf you had more than one test attached to an account before July 18th, you will not be impacted by these changes.
DeleteGlad I skipped them! Thanks for the info on this.
ReplyDeletePS: Dave, you called it. I matched up at FTDNA with Phil Grove just like you surmised!
The real issue with Ancestry is that they have form. From destroying my Y-DNA along with many thousands of others a few years back, thereby depriving us from getting the benefits that we had paid for, to this latest bollocks. I certainly would never trust them to show any integrity into the future, on the DNA front at least.
ReplyDelete