Recent messages suggest that there is some confusion surrounding the new Member Trees, so here is some additional information to help clarify some of the details. When creating a tree through the new member trees, you are not required to make it public. There are several options available.
You can choose to make your tree publicly viewable, or you can choose to not make it public. You can choose the latter by de-selecting the box that says, “Allow others to see my tree as a public member tree and allow my tree information to be compiled into OneWorldTree.” This box is on the page where you give your tree a name. When you de-select that box, you see a yellow box appear that tells you,
- Even if you don’t share your tree, other members can still learn if a specific deceased individual is in your tree, in addition to the birth year and birthplace of the person and your username (but no personal information about you).
- They can then contact you anonymously through Ancestry’s Connection Service to request more information . . .
Ancestry.com’s Connection Service is available through a premium membership, such as U.S. or World Deluxe, or through a basic Family Trees & Connections membership ($19.95 per year). If someone chooses to try to connect to you, you will receive a message like the one below.
Dear [Username Withheld],
I saw that you submitted a personal tree to Ancestry which contains:
Tree name:Â Blog Family Tree
Name: Bloggen Z. Blog
Birth Date: 1850
Birth Place: Blogsville, Blog County, Blog
I am interested in this information. May I be granted access to your tree?
Thank you,
In the message you receive, you are offered the choice to:
- click through and grant the request for the person to view your tree,
- block future messages from that person, orÂ
- “block all messages of [the] sort.”
Should you choose not to make your tree public, you can still share your tree with other trusted family members by clicking on the green “Share my tree” button. On the subsequent page you can invite others to view your tree by entering their names and email addresses, and choose whether or not they are able to see information on living individuals.  Â
More information on the Member Trees can be found on the FAQ page.
I am absolutely in opposition to this new ‘wrinkle.’ I subscribe to ancestry to get information from the primary source databases that are posted, i.e. census, birth and death records, immigration records… I don’t use information from other people’s trees as I have found that so many of them are incorrect.
I do not wish to be contacted by others. Call me selfish… I can take it.
Making me…. FORCING me… to create a tree that can be viewed by others, so that I can have the “honor” of saving census records etc. to “people I am looking for” is an invasion of my privacy.
Added is the new way to search… it’s clumsy and very user unfriendly. But that’s an entirely different issue.
Thank you for making that more clear. 🙂
I have a major complaint about the automatic search feature on the tree.
I have entered the info for the wives of my ancestors but the automatic search feature (the leaves on the tree that lead to possible source info) continues to search the census for them AFTER the marriage date under their maiden name. I then have tons of links to “ignore” one at a time! This is time consuming and aggravating.
I agree with Valesca it doesnt seem to matter that maiden names are entered on FTM unlike this comment I always seem to get married names anyway! the maiden names are lost.
Also, searching specifically for deaths often briongs in masses of irrelevant data including from USA where I am not searching rather than UK where I am searching. Also, just recently where i am searching for a particular name and I have a reference I am getting the same name enclosed by explaining that it is not possible to show me the information. when this happens there are many lines like this. Also, could we have a facility where on FTM we can choose which countries entries we want to search. I would rather work through ie england, then wales, then ireland etc without having mountains of info about USA lists that i a) am not interested in searching, b) are closed off to me anyway.
also, although I use FTM mostly when i can’t find someone I sometimes try going straight to ancestry uk and may find what I want but then can’t upload it to my data base unless i upload my files which i dont want to do really.
also, why can we upload and it will show we have merged a census but not for BMD?
This is more in reference to One World Tree than Member Trees, but I think it may apply to both.
Why should we even bother looking at these trees when they do not provide sources or the name of the submitter?
It seems to me that these are poor-quality sources that require focused research before acceptance. They can only be regarded as clues.
I agree with No. 1.
this member tree thing scared me to death. am a senior,mostly computer illiterate, and thought I would have to give up my subscription to Ancestry if I didn’t comply with member tree stuff. thank you for all your comments, you made my day!
I do NOT like the new Member Trees! I have never liked the One World Tree as it has so many errors and there seems to be no way of contact to correct the errors. For instance; one of my cousins is listed as being married to her sisters husband, but even that is in error as the middle name is not the same and it lists him as dead and he is very much alive. My cousin has tried to correct this to no avail and we still have no way of knowing who put it there in the first place. I am sincerely considering dropping my ancestry subscription.
Please add a way to eliminate possible matches without the tedious process of clicking on “Ignore” for each one individually.
I also have a problem eliminating info I have added and later find out is incorrect. It seems worse in the new Family Tree system.
I am not very computer savy. While trying to check some research on the husband of my aunts second marriage, a family tree on him poped up. Just his name, no further info. I put in her name, birth and death date. The birth date came up wrong. It would not let me change it. Later I went to family trees to see if I could change the date. It would not let me in unless I clicked on makeing it available for public access.
I agree with numbers 1 and 8. I have found my immediate family on One World Tree with many errors and with details on the living. I have no idea who submitted the information. I have not been able to make corrections. I can’t see how Member Trees would be any better.
I have also found errors in One World Tree etc. but it is a great place to find names of possible ancestors and I was under the impression it was always a smart thing to verify the results you found. Hey, Look at some census records, birth records etc..not only year of birth incorrect but names can be misspelled..that is the fun if the hunt!
Nancy
I recently was in Salt Lake City doing research on my line. I was on One World Tree which took me back to 200 BC giving my ancestor as being born in Canada. What a joke, such worthless data should not be allowed. I wasted lots of time and paper downloading that worthless information.
My opinion is this – WHAT THE HELL HAVE ANCESTRY DONE WITH THE SEARCH FEATURE???????? When I click I only want to search on UK, all the American results come up first, then I have to trawl through so many different links JUST to get to the English records!!!
COME ON ANCESTRY – GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER, THIS IS SO USER UNFRIENDLY
I have to agree with #12 – the fun is in the hunt! And the fun is in finding new family members that we didn’t know before and sharing information with them. If their information is inaccurate, they will be thrilled to be able to make the corrections and continue on with the research. I have been able to meet and/or connect with SEVERAL distant family members that I never knew who were happy to share their research, and SOURCES, with me and I shared with them in turn. We all need each other to connect the dots to form our family trees….Some connections were made by others seeing my tree online and others by my seeing theirs and contacting each other by email. I am unfamiliar with this “new” family tree change but as long as we will be able to connect with the submitter via Ancestry or Rootsweb or other family tree site, I will be more than happy to post mine. Even if we can’t contact some of them, even inaccurate information contains a bit of truth and can serve as a jumping off point for research. Family History is all about SHARING after all! Kathy
What’s happened to the site – since all this world tree stuff I have lost access to all my stored info on “people i am looking for” Have tried to get some idea if it will ever be available again but just told its being looked into. How much longer will I be without information that I pay a subscription to use. A site that was always great value for money now becomes a waste of money.
What is the possibility of going back to the reasonable,user friendly,and mostly competant format we had. I pay Ancestry a goodly amount to access records. I do not like the silly additions that do nothing to enhance, but certainly frustrate.
I HATE the new mandatory trees. I do NOT want to upload my tree and I HATE that I can now only save to the shoebox. I have enough boxes of loose stuff in my own house!!!! I want the ability to save to “the people I am looking for” like I used to. Now, all the time that I have spent saving there is going to be wasted as I won’t be able to add more. I am really bummed. REALLY bummed.
And I agree wholeheartedly with those who have said that the One World Tree is pretty useless.
To Ancestry> I have been with you since the beginning of time – through all sorts of changes both good and bad. Please return the “People I am Looking For”. I beg you. It was THE most useful part of the site for me.
This is to add to the frustration expressed by others – I too hate the fact that there appears to be so much incorrect data posted to the trees section of the website. While it is true that once in a while you do find someone who has done research, and upon contact that person is able to provide copies of actual source documentation, these are few and far between. I have too many uploaded trees with wrong data to make this a worthwhile search effort.
Secondly, I too hate going through search results that have no bearing on the specific area being researched! I can enter a search for a specific state, and results pop up for the rest of the 49 states in addition to the one state I am researching in. Time consuming and frustrating – definitly not worth the cost associated with purchasing a full membership.
I would prefer that Ancestry.com staff expend more effort to supplying us with more records rather than focusing on hosting space for trees that are useless due to many errors and/or do not provide a contact. Please focus attention on supplying more records from states that have minimum information on your site currently.
For what it’s worth, I do not want to see unsubstantiated information for my membership fee – I would like to see a highly responsive site to my search criteria and more records.
I have to agree with a lot of the comments. Much too much useless info comes up especially the American stuff which I did not ask for in the those particlular searches. I’m going to wait a bit for the dust to settle around here before I make up my mind where and how I’m going to continue my very newly started quest in this fascinating pastime of searching for those who have gone before me.
I agree with so many above. Ancestry, Please Please leave this as a document site rather than vague trees that are impossible to navigate. I especially agee with Iris, #19, to add more data from United States (especially the south :)). I would like to see more southern newspapers online as well as actual death records and indexes to more states. I primarily continue to subscribe to ancestry. com b/c of the census indexes and images and I have very much enjoyed the WWI Draft Registration images. I need actual sources for my genealogy.
I don’t want to add a tree when I need to put someone in the shoebox. I found a long lost ancestor “in the people I am looking for” b/c ancestry emailed me a census index link and I checked it out even though it was somewhat of a long shot and it checked out. This was an actual census image I looked at and then I was able to obtain additional information from County and State (again, actual documents).
I like the family trees better at Rootsweb when I am looking for “clues” as where I need to go on a line or to see if if anyone else is actively working a line I am interested in. I can leave them a post it or I can email them directly (no middle man). The trees are much easier to read and study. Sources are also included with many trees on rootsweb.
Well, Ancestry, I can say you have made one improvement. Thanks to the new blog format with comments, I can now get a feel for what other users think. Virtually everyone hates the “improved” search format. I was just invited to comment on a beta version of an “advanced search,” and I hope all the other commenters were, too. I hope it helps, and soon. (And thanks, Ancestry, for having the guts to leave all those negative comments posted.)
The other thing I’ve learned from all the comments is that I’m not the only one that thinks the subscription-based One World Tree is bad. I was offered a free trial of this when I did my last renewal, and I have given it a good look. OWT is hard to use, totally untrustworthy, and a time waster. It is sad to think that Ancestry would promote the use of a “database” that is unsourced and unverifiable, the complete opposite of what we hope new family history researchers will learn is good practice.
Your best features are the on-line images of records: the census, the WWI draft registrations, and many of the family histories. Those let us do real-document research. Sure, there are errors in the indexes, but creative searching gets around most of them. Hope you continue to build this kind of resource.
Here, here! To all of the above, especially those who state the obvious…we are all here to access actual records! Nobody wants or needs useless and erroneous information such as is provided through One World Tree! Back when Ancestry was acquiring and publishing census data, there was a genuine reason to subscribe. If Ancestry can’t find more records (including newspapers) to make available to its subscribers, any reason to subscribe vanishes! Incidentally, it would also help if the records available on line could actually be searched (this is in reference to the Historical Newspapers database; I have been waiting since March for the indexing to be repaired as promised by Ancestry.com–nothing yet!)
Would someone please tell me a reason to subscribe to Ancestry.com. The ads all make it very tempting. It sounds that there are a lot of good resourses available, such as the newspapers and other actual records. Is it all that the ads say? I’m just not sure based on all the comments I have just read here.
I, too, have found my “free” use of One World Tree was worthless, and full of errors. I guess that is why it is free. And, I don’t need a lot of other family trees to look at unless all the sources are identified.
I totally agree with the above comments, especially #16. I put “unusual” sources into “people I’m looking for” -delighted that they were “kept” and I wouldn’t have to remember what they were and I could get them when needed. Now with the “new” format – I CAN’T FIND THEM. Where did they go ??? Are they lost forever. I am not completely computer “friendly” so may have missed the “button” to push but PLEASE all those hours of work and excitement in finding them and now I don’t have them and can’t remember how or where I found them. Disappointed, Frustrated, Unhappy, ETC.
I agree with so many of these comments. I’m currently going to Rootsweb for the trees too since they are so much easier to use. I do enjoy the family and local histories section a lot which makes my subscription worthwhile. But please go back to the former, more specific format for searching everything else. Thank you.
I have to agree with several of the above…Ancestry has become very user unfriendly. Searches have become a waste of time, with so many un-useful results appearing each time you do a search on a name. To many errors pop up in the Trees. Let’s get more user-friendly, so we don’t waste so much time sifting through non-essential information. I paid good money out for Ancestry and am now considering it a waste, the first place I usually went to was Ancestry and now that’s changed
because of all the wasted time I spend sifting through things.
I agree with the many comments above. I thought it was just me! The thing that bothers me the most is even when researching (using the old method of “Exact matches only”), I can quickly add a number of census records to my ancestors (good). But I CAN NOT download the records back to my genealogy software on my PC (very bad)! There is no way to port the data back down. So the member tree has little or no research value. I find that most peopel are willing to accept information from anywhere without proper research, that means that searching trees will wait until I finish research every record on Ancestry for every person in my tree.
I have inherited 10,000 records (with little documentation and I want to researh all of them with every record availible on Ancestry.com but must do what I did prior to the “member trees” that is download each image on to my PC, and manually record the information in my software (I use The Master Genealogist).
Any advise on how to port data back to the PC?
Happy hunting everyone!
Thanks,
~Don Buck
db@(nospam)bucksan.com
i need to find out some answers because i know nothing about my family