Ancestry: Family History & DNA

I started my quest in 1983, to trace my family lines as far back as I could. It stated with asking family members and many times getting information that was wrong or they forgot. I traced a couple major lines back 7 generations with old bibles and traveled to many libraries and I felt I had exhausted my leads, and then joined Ancestry in 2003. I have now traced my family tree back to the 1100’s on every single line on my tree and now have over 29,000 records in my tree. Not every green leaf or hint is for the individual in your tree you have to vet the information. Ancestry must have an incredible staff loading records of births, deaths, immigration, wills, census record, church record and photos from past events. In 2013, I added the European records to take my records back even further to the families beginnings. The DNA that was added a few years ago has turbo charged my trace again. I have been finding cousins from ancestors siblings that I never knew existed. Perhaps, if that were not enough, the collaboration of others searching shared ancestry are in most cases willing to reach out to give assistance. Likewise, some will also ask for help. My experience with ancestry has also helped me refocus my energy into a legacy that I can pass on to future generations and pass the torch. I have even considered doing my passion on a full time basis. I recommend Ancestry, if you have a passion to find your family’s beginnings. Thank you.

As usual, this app is riddled with problems. The hints no longer contain the links to the information, so if there is a hint for, say, a Find a Grave profile, I can’t tap the button to go look at the Find a Grave profile (which almost always has a lot more information). The button isn’t there. Same thing for hints that I’ve saved to an Ancestry profile- no links. I also can’t upload any photos. I can open the gallery in a profile, and I can tap the “+” to add a photo, but when I try to tap the photo I want to upload, nothing happens. I’ve tried many times over the last week, and no matter what I do I can’t upload. I use an iPad Pro with super fast WiFi; the problem is not my equipment, it’s the app. I use this app literally every single day, and I’ll never ever understand how an entity as enormous as Ancestry has SO MUCH TROUBLE making an app that works well. We spend a LOT of money for your service. We should be able to use it conveniently on the app. All of my other apps work great. This is the only one that has been consistently buggy for years, and it’s the only service I pay this kind of money for. It’s so frustrating. You’d think you’d want your users to be able to, you know, use your app. And of course you can’t just send a help message to Ancestry. That doesn’t exist. You have to call and sit on hold forever, only to be told that they are “always working to improve the app.” I keep waiting for them to finally get it together and make an app that works consistently, but it’s been a lot of years, so I guess I won’t hold my breath. It’s time to hire a new tech team, Ancestry.

I can’t complain about the amazing range of relatives I’ve discovered going back centuries. But sometimes the hints I get are a little frustrating, because my tree will tell me that “Joseph Smith” is the father of “Sara Brown” while the hints show that Sara is the daughter of “David Jones.” And often it’s hard on the app to navigate your way back to the more remote branches of the tree. That being said, if you’re lucky enough, as I am, to have two parents going back to pre-Revolutionary days (who happen to be light-complected), and suspect that your parents might be distant cousins, you can sometimes find out they are, and also discover Jewish nth-degree great-grandmothers; darker-complected cousins; pastors and poets and actors; Mary Queen of Scots; a slave overseer for Thomas Jefferson 😔; figures such as Robert E. Lee and Martha Washington; Irish criminals deported to the Americas; and an assortment of French Huguenots by way of the British Empire. Your husband might have the DNA test confirm that yes, despite a Greek name and an immigrant from Germany, he is nearly half-Jewish and is attached to storied family fur-trading company owners from Kastoria in Greece who immigrated to the US via Germany. And your children won’t have inherited the same percentages of genes as their siblings. Viva la difference!