Ancestry.com Review

I got one of those FREE ancestry.com memberships. I can't recall where that popped up. I didn't go to the site to get it. It was tacked on with some other online stuff I was checking out. I thought it sounded interesting, so I clicked the button. My bad.

I'm good at net research. That's one of my areas.

I started putting in family names and places. Perhaps all my relatives were morons and could not manage to get on the census. A lot of the old info seems to come from those government studies. Maybe the census takers were too lazy to climb up those mountains. In any case, it seems my family does not exist. I am hating to tell them that.

I did, in fact, find some branches of the family. Not immediate. Some that moved off to Ohio and Maryland.

The information is mostly just lists. There are census documents like I mentioned and other basic lists with names signed. I guess I could add a name here or there to the family tree if I had the energy and time to do that. I'm much more interested in stories and lore. That's not what they offer at ancestry.com. Not where I looked anyway. If you have a famous family, you may get luckier.  

I thought I'd keep looking and see if I found more than what I was coming up with from the start. I marked the cancel date on the calendar, so I'd click out, since I wasn't finding much of interest.

Ancestry.com gave me a Friday cancel date. They took the day off, so I could not cancel when I got in from work around 2 p.m. that day. They do not take any cancels by email. They will sure sign you up online, but you must call in person to cancel. I hate deals like that. AOL does that too. Foul ball. I check now. If an online company can't do email, then I can't do them.

There was a holiday the Monday after this crew who told me to cancel on this random Friday took a day off. Friday was not a holiday. So, I could not even get anyone until Tuesday due to an actual holiday being on Monday and Friday being a bonus day for them I suppose - but a mess for me.

My credit card was charged, of course. The credit card charging folks must have been working that Friday that the cancel the account people took off. They sure hit me with a year subscription to a service that did not even list my family members.

I did finally get someone on Tuesday. First they told me "too bad." I did not cancel. I was stuck paying for a year of the service that I did not want. I said that I'd be taking it up with my credit card company, and it's a good credit card company. They put me on hold a long time to talk about the fact that they gave me a cancel date when they took vacation.

I did learn a lesson. Do not wait until the day they tell you to cancel. They may not be open. Actually, do not sign up with any online company that requires a call in cancel. If they are open, they will put you on hold forever anyway. You may decide to or wish to just pay for a year rather than deal with the mess. I think the charge was only $20 or so for the year at ancestry.com, and the stress with this was not worth $20. I did dig my heels in though, since I write about online services, and I do not like to see online companies jerk folks around. I got jerked. That doesn't happen very often.