When i started with my research i had to go a long way without finding any information. When i finally found the first birth certificate of one of my ancestors, it was a feeling like discovering the pyramids. I remember jumping off my chair in joy with my husband in the room rather confused. Now that i collected a lot of information i still get very emotional with every new picture of my ancestors. Just yesterday i saw my great-grandpa for the first time. Just wonderful! And ancestry helps me to gather and store all my information conveniently in one place and makes it easy to share it with my family. I will be able to present our family book to my dad for his birthday. Thank you very much for making this possible!

I tried uploading a small trial gedcom to check out the Ancestry tree. First, I was feeling very upset that no sources made it into my family tree, then I finally realised my missing general notes were under Research Notes and only visible to me and anyone I gave full editing rights to. Wondering why I would want to give other people control over my research, I then tried adding a few records and a photo to the trial tree to see if they survived an update but then total confusion! I couldn’t find a way to update by gedcom. With the current set up on Rootsweb/Ancestry I usually update my gedcom every few weeks. Am I missing something? Am I expected to mirror every change I make to my records in the future by editing each individual record one by one duplicating the changes I have already made to my program at home? If I upload a new gedcom I will lose any attached records so that won’t work, what am I to do?

No sources, no way to easily update replaced by the horrendous ability to just copy over others records without knowing where they got them or how accurate they are - what is happening to a previously useful resource?

I really hope you can let me know I have got it wrong as I am really upset by this and don’t know how I will be able to display a public Ancestry tree or my private Myfamily tree now it seems it has all been ruined.

I was absolutely stunned to find through a member tree a picture postcard with my grandmother’s picture and her handwriting on the reverse side! She died long before I was born and the only image that I had of her was a tiny, badly damaged photo given to me by my father.

Now I am very motivated to share some of the research finds that I have made about my family. I hope that someone might be as bowled over by some fact or photo that I share as I was when I happened across that postcard.

While I agree that there are some “success” stories connected with the new AWT, I continue to be dismayed by the amount of questionable data posted by some other people. As often commented on by others, it appears that some folks simply want to “fill in the blanks”. Some of the mistakes are laughable, such as a mother dying before some of her children are born.

I don’t care if some folks are careless in their research…that’s their right. However, the “clues” feature actually encourages the perpetuation of mistakes and questionable research.

As a suggestion, take a random look at any of the posted trees and see how much of the posted information is completely “unsourced”. The amount of this information is stunning. Many people are just adding the postings of others to their own tree–even the spelling mistakes are replicated.

As a suggestion, I think the program should segregate beteween “sourced” and “unsourced” posted information. In that way, those of us who are serious about our research can easily ignore the information that’s unsourced.

I generally like the features of AWT, but Ancestry.com is at a crossroads here. Is it more interested in the quantity of information or in the quality of posted information?

resualting to blowing your own trumpet will not stop people from looking at the rest of the blogs on here and relizing that there is defently some issues in regard to the AMT system that a lot of us are not happy with. there would i am sure be far more entering their opinions on this subject if there were an eaisaly visable link to these blogs on the other sites within the ancestry comunity. i say that because there IS NOT a link from the uk site so you are not getting the feed back from my side of the pond.
feather more you make no mention that many have infact removed their trees because of their unease with AMT and other issues. stop trying to convince your selves that AMT is a greate success because it is not. ancestry has been making many such blunders since the interduction of that disartarous ONE WORLD TREE was introduced which still remains to this day. in my opinion you need to sack all your programers and those who are only there for a job and who have no interest in genealogy or have no concept what genealogists want from the ability to use an online tree. because sure as hell they have pulled the site down. all the bells and wistles you keep adding is not addressing the many problems which keep being brought up. ancestry it seems are blinkered to the fact that if they dont start listening and provide us with what we want most; MORE RECORDS, and a simple non bells and whistle tree system available to view FREE to all on the net there will not be an ancestry to go to as more and more will simply not renew the subscripions they have and those on trial will simple not continuee after they expire.

Why not provide an option to easily transfer “research notes” intended for public viewing/sharing into the “add a story” provision in your new format?

Um, Judy, coming to Ancestry.com’s defense, they have been doing a lot more by adding more records for the subscribers than ever before. Keep in mind, some those newly added records were acquired after months (or years) of negotiations between Ancestry.com and the original holders of these records. Not all records are free, due to privacy and copyright laws, especially in other countries. Ancestry.com is a commercial site, not a free site providing all the records for free (in a perfect world, yeah). They don’t set up everything for free and programmers are hired for their specific technical skills applicable to the core Ancestry technologies, in order to make the whole website and its core products workable for the subscribers online.

However, I agreed with you that the OWT is a troubled product from the get-go, as it was made in a rush to satisfy the early subscribers’ demand for instant access to general but thoroughly unproven data on ancestors back in the first few years of 2000. I have learned that much of OWT’s data was based on vast family trees compiled in the early days of the Internet, much with uncorroborated or unproven sources and connections. It was basically a “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” kind of thing popularized in the Internet’s boom years.

just in case there was any confusion . when i refered to providing items for free it was not the parish, census records ectra but the submitted trees that i was refering to.

i for one recognise that ancestry does a lot of behind the secens nogotiations when it comes to parish records and the alike and would not for one moment expect to receive the advantage of using them for nothing.
but when it comes to submitit trees i do hope that ancestry whould recconise the advantage of alowing others to see the trees as it would help to draw other subscribers to ancestry. whether they stay or not does hing on wether ancestry started to understand that they have a problem when it comes to ditching the simple to use no whistles and bells OLT for that over grown monster AMT that so many hate and are being forced to use AND CERTAINLY THEY SHOULD RELIZE THAT owt SHOULD HAVE THE PLUG PULLED AS IT IS THE MOST ERRONOUS PRODUCING BIT OF S*** ON THE NET. NO PROGRAM SHOULD AMALGIMATE SUBMITTED TREES IN THE WAY IT DOES.

Yes, that is one of the features that bothers me a lot. If I eventually decide to undertake the mammoth amount of work involved in linking my tree to thousands of Ancestry.com records and adding my photos and certificates, sources etc then arrange to update the individual records every time I add something to my research instead of just updating the gedcom every few weeks then to have my extended family view my notes it looks as if I will have to allow them editing rights and risk someone “helpfully” or accidentally adding possibly thousands of dubious people to my work with an incautious click of a button.

This combine someone Else’s tree with yours is a feature we do not need. Family Tree research is not a collect thousands of names as quickly as you can game. With the help of my family I’ve tried to put together the best history I can and I’m happy to share Photo’s, Certificates, records with my family which is why I pay for a Myfamily site to make it easy for everyone to share what we know so far but Ancestry and Myfamily seem determined to stuff this up. I really don’t know what to do now but I’m certainly actively looking for an alternative.

This site is good when you want to look at census records or other documents that you can’t find at the library or when you don’t want to go the library. But the Family Tree part of the Website P** me off because most of the information is wrong. I haven’t been on this site long but I am not happy finding my family information, which thankfully I haven’t submitted in a tree, in someone else’s tree where they add more kids and a different mother.

Ancestry.com needs find a way to make them source there information, real sources not just one world tree as their source. Maybe not let them publish the tree unless everything is verified I have been doing research on my ancestors for about 30 years++ I am happy to help people out , but not like this. Something has got to change or this could hurt and confuse research in the future.

I agree with the comments made by Leah, et.al. The feature allowing the wholesale posting/merger of unsourced (mis) information simply isn’t useful.

Ancestry.com is at a crossroads here. Is it interested soley in the amassing of data without regard to its validity? Or, is Ancestry primarily interested in amassing high quality data?

There is a compromise here…allow the user the option of seeing ALL input or of seeing ONLY that information which is sourced.

I realize that Ancestry.com is in the business of making money. But it must make a choice as to whom its target market is–people who simply want to “fill in the blanks” so that they can demonstrate how they’re descended from some luminary or people who are interested in serious research.

If Ancestry.com chooses the former, it will become the laughingstock of the genealogy world.

I want to edit the data I have on www.oneworldtree.com

I have no idea how to do it.

Can anyone tell me the keystrokes I must execute to go to my account and delete all of the data on my account?

Cordially,

David Allen Navorska
Irving TX

hi

you can remove / submit trees into AMT and we can remove one or more records from OUR SUBMITED tree when we want.

Unfortunetly as far as i know there is NO WAY to remove your file from OWT. this is not a system that you as a person can submit a tree or remove a tree from. as the system has been set up as a tool. what happens here is that ancestry loads ALL submitted into OWT under thier own controll. once there the program then looks for any matches. all that the program needs is a name which is the same and if it feels that any one of the submitted fields in birth death marriage and alike is the same even if it is only approxametlly it will declear the two as the same and amalgimate the two into one tree. this happens mostly when one or more of the fields are missing.

when OWT was first launched we had the conntroll to add our tree to the system ourselves (as i said you cant do that now) and i quickly learned this. in one of my directancestors i left the birth date and death date without an entry but i did have the christening and marriage both in england. by the time the program had finnished it amalgimated another with the same name as mine from usa so that my ancestor showed that his birth had taken place in usa then a few years later he was christened and married in england then in the same year as his marriage he was married in the usa then had a son in england and in usa in the same month and they then had him die in england. i quickly removed the tree and correct the missing fields on the ancestor but neglected to do this with the others in the tree anyway the above ancestor was then corrected a time later i was alerted to the fact that OWT had done the same with another relative but by this time we could not remove the tree details as ancestry had taken over the system entirly. to this day that 2nd ancestor remains screwwed up dispite my OLT / AMT TREE BEING REMOVED AND RESUBMITTED SEVERAL TIMES. i have several times gone into OWT and used the edit tool but the incorrect version remains and my corect version has yellow triangles by it saying they belive my data to be wrong. this has caused me to have check the submited person on every tree on ancestry as i found that the amalgimated tree has been accepted by researchers as fact on both here and other sites and place the following

The USA content you might find showing for his birth,death and for his parentage ON VARIOUS OTHER TREES is erroneous information which was CREATED BY ANCESTRYS ONE WORLD TREE PROGRAM BY AMALGIMATION OF TWO TREES that I have found with dismay has been accepted and past around as fact by others. One tree, the original data shown here on my tree, was submitted by me to One world tree and concerns the wield Hampshire Westbooks, the other was submitted by another researcher and concerned the USA Westbrook’s. When our trees were submitted to One World Tree THE PROGRAM decided that these two Thomas Westbrook’s were the same person despite the fact they came from two different continents and had two different set of dates in the birth entry. THERE ARE NO PARISH RECORDS WHICH CONNECT THESE TWO TREES AS NONE EXCIST ANYWHERE. This is for the simple reason THEY ARE TWO SEPERATE FAMILYS. Thomas Westbrook of brown Candover/ Wield Hampshire. DID NOT have American parents. He DID NOT go to or come from, never lived or have ANY connection to the USA, of course this applies to the USA Thomas he had no connection to England what so ever. The data that you have possible found which show both USA and English connections HAS NO GENELOGICAL TRUTH WHAT SO EVER. It is a factious amalgamation which was created by a very unreliable bit of programming produced by ancestry. Unfortunately this is now being accepted by many researchers as true. I have checked all data in the Hampshire parish records for this the correct tree please check my tree which is always to be called ‘A FAMILY WANDERING BRITAIN’ where my work on our common family remains unaffected by the ambiguous one world tree program and where I have used true data from PARISH RECORDS not a computer programs amalgamation.

as you are asking about removel / editting i think you have found out that the program has done something like this too you. the long and the short of it is that the OWT info even if it concerns your own submitted tree is un changable yes you can edit it so that when you see it it does not show the unwanted data but the amalgimation remains for all to see as the details are now in the system.

there have been calls for its removel but still it remains

ANCESTRY ARE YOU LISTENING

REMOVE OWT AND THE OVER GROWN MOSTER AMT NOW THIS IS NOT ENHARNSING YOUR SITE BUT DOING THE OPPOSIT

Merging from the OWT-ONEWORLDTREE consolidated view of possible family matches SHOULD NOT be allowed. Merging/sourcing should only be allowed from ONE individual tree at a time.

Here is another example like Judy describes:

http://trees.ancestry.com/owt/person.aspx?pid=18715220

There are 22 user submitted trees.

18 for Jefferson Bryant and 4 for Jefferson Barnett.

Oneworldtree compiles this into a view showing Jefferson Bryant being married to three spouses with three sets of children.

If someone uses the merge feature and selects ONEWORLDTREE to be merged/sourced, it will merge with Jefferson Bryant all three spouses (TWO OF THOSE BING JEFFERSON BARNETTS, NOT JEFFERSON BRYANTS) and all three sets of children. There are public member trees with this very situation right now.

Their trees have him married three times with three sets of children, when in fact he was married to only one wife and one set of children.

PLEASE fix this. DO NOT ALLOW merge from ONEWORLDTREE consolidated view. Only allow merge/source from ONE of the 22 trees making up the trees in the view at a time.

The longer this merge of the consolidated, POSSIBILITY VIEW, is allowed to happen, more and more inaccurate trees in AMT are going to be created.

This possibility view is for RESEARCH ONLY, a way to get a list of possible trees to review. Many Many of these OLD trees have valuable clues of where to do research. These trees were entrusted by their creators to be handled correctly by ancestry.com, even if they are not accurate, but many of these trees were created by people now deceased and want their research to be preserved and shared. They would not want their tree merged with the other trees even if by accident when using the merge feature, for example pulling in the parents of Jefferson Barnett and giving them to Jefferson Bryant (not the case here I think), but that is what could happen on other examples.

Please ancestry, listen, stop the merge from oneworldtree. It is combining many trees with totally unrelated people into one tree.

I too am concerned about the errors that I contributed to One World Tree. I started my tree on Ancestry.com. Frankly, I did not know what I was doing. My tree was private and I thought that my information was private. I worked and gradually added family and corrected errors as I found them. It was only after several months that I found out that my PRIVATE TREE was part of the ONE World TREE. It was my original entires, not my corrections that appeared. I have removed my tree, but the information is still there. I got some excellent help thanks to a distant cousin’s (who I did not know) excellent tree on my grandmother’s family. She died when my father was a toddler and we never had any contact. However, I am very distrubed that others are using my early mistakes and will not take the time to verify the information. I think the One World Tree should be ended and allow access to individual trees which can be judged individually on their merits.

PHILLIP GREVER DIED AT ST NEW JOSEPH CEMENTARY BESIDE FRANZ ARNOLD GREVER MOUNMENT AT CINCINNATI OHIO DO APPRICATE IF YOU COULD FIND PHILLIP GREVERS BURIAL

how to get touch with you,ineed help?

Well, bravo Ancestry! But, even as I read the entry, I thought to myself- how many of those 500 million names are redundant? How many entries are inaccurate, and/or without any basis in fact? And we- the community- think this way all because of OWT. I have full access to this site, and the one place I do not go is the OWT. You simply can’t trust what is on any ‘tree’ there. It needs to go, or at the very least, be radically modified.

To be sure, there will always be people on this site who feel the urge to merge. They will be the ones that say,”This seems to be the same tree, and I’ll be adding more names. What a big and lovely tree I have.” And congratulate themselves for being so clever. (These are the same kind of people who send you those ‘helpful’ forwards all the time.) Also, these same people will use a OWT as a ’source’.

These people, Ancestry can do nothing about. But, they can do something about OWT.

[…] much improved and the things they have in the hopper over there are getting pretty exciting. The numbers show (and below) - as millions of people create trees, dig for records and share their research with […]

I just discovered another version of my family tree dated from 2005 on One World Tree that is riddled with errors. This is embarrassing. I will give Ancestry credit for finally over-riding the 2002 or 2003 tree that was up for a long time. This 2005 version of my family tree that is currently on OWT has wrong people matched to wrong families, and I don’t know where in One-World (pun intended) those people came from.

People are incorporating these errors into their trees. I have written several times to Ancestry, asking them to remove my information from OWT because it is wrong, but the tree remains online for the world to see.

My father’s family is the Sinclair family from Virginia into Kentucky into Indiana, and when I began working on my tree 10+ years ago, I made the same mistakes most beginning researchers do. I looked at censuses and other family trees, and because a name was the same, the ages were right and that person was living in a place where they should be living, or where I thought they should be living, I added those people into my tree without any backup documentation. Ancestry then took my tree, placed it into the One World Tree system and proceeded to match my names up with other names from other unrelated trees which resulted in a hodge-podge mess.

My errors also created another mess in that during the beginning years of my research some of my Sinclair cousins copied my entries without confirming the information they were taking. When I got around to getting my info confirmed and documented, some of the people I had included as children to a head Sinclair matriarch turned out to be the children of other branches of the Sinclair family. These mistakes were immediately corrected in my tree, but one of my cousins has refused to correct her trees that are currently on Ancestry. I wrote to her and while she acknowledged my new information, she will not correct her tree. Her tree is uploaded into the original OFT and also the new AMT. She also recently submitted her family tree to the LDS Family Search site complete with wrong names and will not correct the LDS tree. That tree has now been printed to disc and sent out to all the Family Search libraries around the United States.

Where I am leading with this subject is that with the hints merge feature, I have now discovered eight (8) brand new Sinclair trees with my cousin’s incorrect entries, all identical, all complete with the wrong name entries, dates and even the typos. AMT members are merging my cousin’s tree into their trees from the Ancestry merge feature and accepting her information as true and correct.

I have also discovered at least six (6) trees related to other branches of both mine and my husband’s family that have merged information in their trees from my old 2005 tree on OWT, and also included are the weird names attached to my tree from other people’s trees.

Somewhere on one of these blogs, I read a posting by a man who was outraged because the merge feature was malfunctioning and he couldn’t merge names into his tree fast enough. This man went on to decry against Ancestry because he was paying for something he wasn’t getting.

ATTENTION ANCESTRY.COM! Can’t you see what you are doing?!

Five years from now someone else researching my family is going to come to Ancestry and look at these trees that have errors in them and accept them as fact, all because Ancestry promoted unsourced, unconfirmed, undocumented research.

Yes, I will agree that Ancestry.com has more than likely reached 500 million names, but this figure is distorted in that the number is derived from all the same trees, merged and remerged and merged again, taken from OWT, OFT and other AMTs. I’ll also go far enough to state that some of these names include trees that were submitted to AMT and then deleted, and also include names on trees submitted to Rootsweb that is now www.rootweb.ancestry.com.

As for the number of photos claimed to have been uploaded, I am finding a countless number of pictures copied several times over to different trees. Same picture, same person, different tree. I also find what appear to be entire modern day family albums uploaded to your website. The picture feature can be nice because even I like to see what one of my ancestors looked like, but I am not sure that most of the people who uploaded their photos to your website did it with the intention of seeing their pictures being incorporated in other trees. To be honest, I don’t get it when I see a 2007 picture of little Danny sitting naked in a kiddie pool with his duckie or several angles of a 2001 picture of Auntie Myrtle in her nightgown sitting in the 1980 family station wagon. I think the worst picture I have seen to date was the one of an 80 year old woman in a hospital bed with tubes running out of her nose and arms. That is a sad picture and I would think that that woman would not want that picture posted on the internet if she knew her family member was going to do that.

I can’t find any last posts,this site just got harder…do I have to pay now to get info?just wondering

Kenney …not sure where to ask for enhancements for online family trees, but here goes ….ever any thought of adding a to-do list to the online family trees. Seems like I am always in the middle of something when I come across something new, and then I get side tracked (part of getting old I guess) …if there were a to-do list, then instead of getting side track, I could add items to the to-do list for future action!

Thanks for all the great additions to Ancestry.com’s online family tree ….I have totally moved from FTM-2008 to the online family tree. One day when they finally get FTM-2008 bugs fixed and preformance improved, I may go back, but for now I am hooked on the online family tree.

Ron

Kenny; I thought after our phone conversation that you were going to post clarification of some of our misconceptions about the changes. I haven’t seen any. Only the one reference to our having spoken. There are still many issues as I am reading. When will they be corrected? If Ancestry has no intention of correcting these major flaws then be professional and just say so. Say “This is how it is like it or leave. We do not care what the consummers think.” Then we could move on instead of very impatiently waiting for the changes needed to make this the best site on the web. It was once, can you bring it back to that level of quality, or as so many have said, is your only goal the number of enteries, not the quality of information provided?

Im doing family tree scrapbook . I sent all family members a letter and a family report to fill out and return . I find ancestorycom and family search.org grat resources. Any one have other free websites where i could get family information?

i having discovered some important data have yesterday updated my tree by submitting a compleate new copy to AMT at the same time i resubmitted my tree to RootsWeb, gencircles, tribalpages and myheratiage. all but ancestry had the newer version fully searchable within 24 hours. ancestry STILL HAS NOT yet it is the same info on each one. i will monetor and nag you reminding ALL how long it takes for your inferier and totaly c*** system finaly does the update.
i will also watch that peice of junk ONE WORLD TREE to see if the info metioned which resulted in my updatedtree submition does in fact clear out the erronous data it has created on my thomas westbrook which i have mentioned in other posts. this i doubt will happen as i have no faith in the bit of junk programing which forms ONE WORLD TREE perpetuating errounous data as it does.
so hear we are aprox 1 day thats 24 hours since i submitted a new tree to all sites mentioned all have updated exept you.

MY COUNT TO FULLY SEARCHABLE TREE
ONE DAY …NOT ON LINE YET

MY COUNT TO FULLY SEARCHABLE TREE
TWO DAYS …NOT ON LINE YET

MY COUNT TO FULLY SEARCHABLE TREE
THREE DAYS …NOT ON LINE YET

Judy,
It will take a minimum of seven (7) full days before your tree and/or any changes to that tree become available for public viewing.

Even if we kicked Ance$try in their rear end, the AMT system doesn’t update any faster.

When I built my huge family tree in 45 minutes with information solely taken from other people’s trees, I then sat back and waited for the new tree to show up on a search.

SEVEN DAYS.

Unacceptable.

Still no notes available to the public for viewing.
Still no gedcom availability.
Still so multiple generational descendency view.
Still no Ahnentafel.
Still no way to print out information on the AMT trees.

Unacceptable.

yeah i know last time it was almost 3 week s which is why i placed the counter so all that read the blog will see what a c*** system AMT is . when you concider that RootsWeb the old OLT sytem was updated at the same time and that IS searchable now and it only took 24 hours to become so.
i wonder what your exsuse is this time kenny.

MY COUNT TO FULLY SEARCHABLE TREE
FOUR DAYS …NOT ON LINE YET

i am trying to cancel this account as soon as possible and am not having any luck….please cancel this immediately….norma mullinix normad99@aol.com

MY COUNT TO FULLY SEARCHABLE TREE
FIVE DAYS …NOT ON LINE YET

MY COUNT TO FULLY SEARCHABLE TREE
six and 1\2 DAYS …NOT ON LINE YET

HAVING TROUBLE TRYING TO FIND MILITARY RECORD ON HOVIS”S mY GRANDFATHER WAS JOHN EMORY HOVIS SERVED IN WWII AND EVERY WEBSITE WANTS $. HOW CAN THEY CHARGE FOR INFO ON YOUR OWN HISTORY? CAN YOU HELP!
THANKS
PAMELA BLANKENSHIP(HOVIS)

MY COUNT TO FULLY SEARCHABLE TREE
SEVEN DAYS …NOT ON LINE YET

it seems the customer service stinks, i’ve been asking for weeks now how I can remove the OWT that I added years ago.. and noone has told me how. Add to that there are 3 versions of my tree on ancestry right now and none of them are attributable to me, the contact is listed as unknown. My tree has tripled and been corrected many times since them, why can’t they just trash this useless excuse for research!

debbie

the long and the short of it is as custumers we no longer have the ability to add or REMOVE the OWT files. it is now entirly in the hands of the ancestry programers.

as for the trees not attributed to you they came from the files on rootsweb which they captured about 18mts ago and removed all contributers names!

MY COUNT TO FULLY SEARCHABLE TREE
EIGHT DAYS …NOT ON LINE YET

MY COUNT TO FULLY SEARCHABLE TREE
NINE DAYS …NOT ON LINE YET

MY COUNT TO FULLY SEARCHABLE TREE
TEN DAYS …NOT ON LINE YET

AS I BELIVE IN BEING FAIR AND REPORTING CORRECT FACTS IF POSSIBLE

below is the answer,from kenny, to the email i sent in response to kennys reuest on the ‘Online Family Tree Announcement’ blog message POST 376 but it sould be noted the file is not on line as i write this.

**********************************

Hi Judy,

Sorry to not get back to you sooner. It turns out there IS a bug in our indexing which has caused some of the information to be only partially indexed. The bug has been identified and fixed, so you should see success soon—probably today or tomorrow.

Our apologies for this bug—and we thank you for your persistence which helped us track it down.

Best,

Kenny

MY TREE IS NOW ON LINE dispite the fact it has now appeared i have made the desion that when i delet the old version of the tree i will not re upload the photos i have currently with the old file as my over all opinion with AMT has not changed which is it is all bells and whistles which does not meet my expectations of an informative and functionable system that is free to view to all. if ancestry insists on continueeing with this white elephant the figurs will eventually speak for them selves. its ancestrys loss not mine. why they ever abandond the old OLT RATHER THAN RELAUNCH IT WITH A FEW TWEEKS BEATS ME. IT WAS BY FAR A MUCH BETTER SYSTEM which is very much missed by all.

I have been looking for my family for some time and I have a lot of info but just can’t seem to connect with any one, but I found your site today and maybe I can finally find someone before I die.
Just wanted to let you know.
Thank You
Susan

I am quite old (87) and new at this game.I am seeking all the info I can legally find regarding my ancestors, scotch, irish, english. I am now seeking a gr gr grandma last known (?) to have resided in Page County, Iowa.He maiden name was Ream of Lancaster CO., PA, married in ohio to John Taylor. After his death she married Lewis G. Lambert in Morgan County, IL. From there she moved to SW Iowa but I seek `proof’ of that Iowa death of Elizabeth Lambert, age 85.I appreciate any help I may gather. George.

A function that I really love to see be created for Ancestry.com is a button that lets you see how you are related to a specific person in your tree. For example: I am a descendent of James IV of Scotland; I would like to be able to click on a button that lets me see how I am related to him.

The whole OWT problem could be corrected by creating a WikiTree where people could correct wrong info, state their source, and you could track who made the changes. Violators adding delibertely wrong info (e.g., recursive info) could be barred from contributing.

I always read all articles
and comments in your columns. Please keep it coming to all of us who really enjoy Ancestry.co.

i need to reach rootweb.ancestry.com/nychauta . thats the site ive been given. seen it before and now i cant access it. why not? it has all my family photos and my area info in it. would you please explain to me what i’m doing wrong now.

hi is this the site

CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY
NYGENWEB SITE

if so your link above is wrong as you missed out the ’s’ after ‘root’

if you noticed that and corrected it prior to this. then all i can say is i was able to get to it ok so dont know why you cant

The Oneworldtree feature on Ancestry should be removed. It is bad genealogy. Genealogy is not about VOTING. I was floored when I read “When members add family tree information to OneWorldTree, they essentially “vote” for that information. The information with the most “votes” is what OneWorldTree recommends. At the same time, your view of your family tree in OneWorldTree will always show the information you originally entered.
” You should be embarrassed by this feature.

i am searching for members of joseph franklin parks, henry s. dowdy (1855) and robert reynolds from conn., all tips would be appreciated. thanks

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I was quite taken aback last evening when I casually stumbled into a serious problem with other people “appropriating” my entire Family Tree and then casually using the information, as if it belonged to them. Right now, I am ready to remove my tree from Ancestry.com, as I am so very upset by this turn of events. It literally makes me ill thinking about it.

I’ve spent almost thirty years gathering information on my ancestors; making countless trips to city and state archives; writing off for birth and death records; contacting people in almost every part of the globe to gather photos and info about our common ancestors. I’ve recorded countless hours of video to preserve the family histories…not to mention the scores of photos that have been scanned and readily shared with other family members who’d never seen them, along with any and all information that any one ever sought from me.

Perhaps a little insight into what has caused me this much grief would be appropriate here: Last night, just by luck, I followed a “Hint” in my own tree that was attached to my paternal grandmother’s name. That put me in the middle of another individual’s Family Tree, and I was absolutely shocked at what I found there. My entire tree of over 1300 individuals; going back to the early 1700s on both sides, had now become the Family Tree of a very, very, distant cousin…with no acknowledgement whatsoever that it was the result of my thirty years research, and no request made to me for the right to use that information IN TOTAL, right down to the very last name and date.

And, to add insult to injury, I found that my own grandmother had been given a second husband (referred to as husband 1 actually), relegating her own dear husband, Hugh, to the position of husband 2.

It would appear my grandmother had also become the mother of an additional four or five children, all of whom appear to have arrived AFTER she’d given birth to eleven children with Hugh (aka husband 2) with their eleventh and last child being born in 1902. Are you confused by all of this? I know that I am! What other erroneous information on my family is lurking in the midst of this individual’s attempt to fabricate a “ready-made” Family Tree of their very own?

For the record, my grandmother was only married one time, and she was the mother of only eleven children. There was no other husband at any time and no further children who, incidentally, would have been half-siblings of my fathers.

How could someone just appropriate someone’s Family Tree and then proceed to make that kind of an amendment to the existing records? It just boggles my mind.

I have contacted this person and pointed out the problem with her attributing a second husband to my grandmother, and she has yet to respond to my request that she correct her errors.

What recourse do I have at this time?

Rose O’Donnell Mulcahy

I used oneworldtree and had great sucess and now I can’t find it on ancestry.com. I don’t lnow how to access the work I was tracing. Please help me figure out how to get back to oneworldtree on ancestry. Thanks, Judy

judy

a word of warning

DO NOT relie on the ‘one world tree’ and be very sceptable of it as the program is designed to combine similar names together that have only APROXAMETLY THE SAME data.

i learnt this the hard way.

i submited my tree when it was first launched and found first a brother of my 3 ggf on my fathers side and then second my 5 x ggf on my mothers side both of whom were born, lived and died in ENGLAND and never ever had a connection to the USA were combined (into familys which were unconnected to each other) with usa counter parts and my relatives were then reading as born in england and died in the usa the first was surposed to be married here in england then in the usa in the same year and then was ment to have had children in both england and usa to the respective partners at the same time efectively making him a time traveling bigamist. i spotted this early and was able to change it. but to date the second one has been accepted as it is still showing by those using OWT and is still being cited as born in england and died in usa to american parents with a mixture of the two wives and the children confused one even has the second one having a brother of the same name living at the same time as him dispite my advise on the AMT AND OTHER NON ANCESTRY DATA BASES.

IF I WAS YOU i would not use it at all.

judy

I am very concerned that so many people are ignoring the fact that a lot of the family trees posted on Ancestry are not sourced or are take from One World Tree. Most people do not read the caution that these are to be used as secondary tools for research. They are being posted as primary sources when in fact it amounts to no source at all. Would it be possible for Ancestry to make it more clear that unsourced trees are proof of nothing. The LDS site is doing the same thing…but at least they are posting very visiably where the info came from. I am very concerned that so many people are putting out trees the back avidly as proven fact when in fact there is no real proof at all.

Ancestry never seems to learn do they!

They have moved around all those bells and whistles on this over graphic burdened AMT in an effort to show they are LISTENING TO US THEIR CUSTUMERS they even moved the research notes up to a more visible position but the fact remains there are no improvements at all. The research notes are now where you can see then IF YOU OWN THE TREE but it seems they are still INVISABLE TO ALL BUT THOSE THAT THE OWNER OF THE TREE INVITE. The page is less informative on the family than before.

ancestry are acting just like a party magician they think that a little bit of slight of hand will impress and quieten our concerners but we know illusion when we see it especially badly preformed illusion. At the end of the day we have gained no improvement yet again we will protest while ancestry goes off to try to learn a new trick to enthral us. Ancestry needs to remember we know how magic works.

I wish we could turn back time and go back to the way things were before the OWT WAS EVEN CONCIVED BECAUSE THATS WHEN THE ROT SET IN but that is an impossible dream mean while we have to watch as the site which we all once loved and wanted to be with for life changes in a direction which will inevitable end in divorce by many customers when they don’t renew their subscriptions that they have possible have had for years. it such a shame when the record collection is so vast and important to us the customers that the improvements which are being rolled out on NEW SEARCH and AMT are angering us the customers rather than pleasing us that we are all begin to fall out of love and we slowly look more and more towards the only solution left open to us.

DORVORCE

Some twit took my family tree and incorporated his/her stinkin’ ancestors onto my father and grandmother. When I clicked on “Contact Information” my name as the contact displayed. I never submitted the ancestors for my grandmother that are shown and I resent the supercilious twit who messed around with my family tree. How do I correct this?

First you need to contact the owner and ask them their sorce pointing out that the people concerned were YOUR direct ancestors whom you grew up knowing personaly( persumerbly),whom you spoke to MANY times and for whom you have official documents (persumerble). there fore the info THEY ARE showing is not corect and could they please explaine why they think it is. put this ALL on the coment page as well where others who are interested in having correct info for there tree can see that the person has not been too cearful and has proble trawlled for info with out backing up.

i know how you feel as i have had my own tree screwed up by the ONE WORLD TREE and now about 30 people have the wrong info and still more are copying it some after my approching this way have amended the tree to the correct version but others just dont care which is why i say LEAVE A COMMENT on the wrong tree itself. keep on at them too challenge them to provide official document citations which can be checked up”

I like many others over a period of time and adding hundreds of names to my family tree unfortunately have duplicates. Is there any way in ancestry,com that these can be removed or merged with others? This is a feature in FTM but I haven’t seen it here.