RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: MWG on Tuesday 02 July 24 14:27 BST (UK)
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As a long time user of Ancestry.co.uk, when I entered death and burial events (year), I could then add a separate / different residence (in the same year) and the system would always record residence before death and burial in logical chronological order.
Now, changes by Ancestry place residence after death and burial!
Has anyone else noticed this problem and reported it to Ancestry?
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If you are just putting a year with no month or day then surely Ancestry is sorting it as D (death) alphabetically before R (residence) rather than date order
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I don't know how Ancestry is sorting the dates, but all my many entries that used to show residences before death (whether with a specifc date or just a year) now show them after death.
It makes the life story less logical.
Does Ancestry have an e-mail address? I cannot find one on the site, only a virtual assistant.
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I noticed this some time ago. It annoyed me, so I changed all residence dates to the day before death - problem solved.
Regards
Chas
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I've also noticed that deaths may now be placed after burials.
For example, if I input a death date of 15 March 1900, and then a burial date of March 1900 (because I don't know the exact date in March), the death appears last.
Pretty sure that wasn't how it used to be - the burial would have been placed last, because common sense said that a burial always came after the death!
I can solve it by just giving the year for the burial, and omitting the month, but it is irritating nevertheless.
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This change is fairly recent, as I have been working on my tree regularly for some time.
If enough users complain, Ancestry may go back to the original settings.
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I've also noticed that deaths may now be placed after burials.
For example, if I input a death date of 15 March 1900, and then a burial date of March 1900 (because I don't know the exact date in March), the death appears last.
Pretty sure that wasn't how it used to be - the burial would have been placed last, because common sense said that a burial always came after the death!
I can solve it by just giving the year for the burial, and omitting the month, but it is irritating nevertheless.
I have always put Aft. [date] or Bef. [date] if I only know one fact, either date of death or date of burial and that hasn't changed recently.
Similarly, if I only know the date of baptism, in the birth fact box I put Bef. [date of baptism] and that still presents in the correct order as it has always done.
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Ancestry does have a feedback form,
https://ancestry.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eaMJAIOG9lwk709
You might get further by ringing 0800 7831340, and pointing out that the exact date of death is nearly impossible to find before 1837, and the only other alternative to get Death and Burial in the right order is to change the date of burial to just month and year, or even just the year.
At the moment the Burial first, Death second just makes Ancestry look stupid!
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I received an invitation yesterday from Ancestry to complete a customer satisfaction survey. To me, the questions are a bit loaded to Ancestry. A lot of the questions were about their 'helpful hints'. I gave an honest feed back and I would like to think that somewhere, someone will take on board that all of my tree searches are linked to the UK and not the 'xxxxxxxx' USA!!
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I received an invitation yesterday from Ancestry to complete a customer satisfaction survey. To me, the questions are a bit loaded to Ancestry. A lot of the questions were about their 'helpful hints'. I gave an honest feed back and I would like to think that somewhere, someone will take on board that all of my tree searches are linked to the UK and not the 'xxxxxxxx' USA!!
That would be great.
It annoys me like mad that with the UK & Ireland selected the damn system gives USA based results.
Mind you if you think Ancestry is bad try Find My Past, it is not user friendly at all, it is slow the searching is painful, yes it does have the 1921 census and Newspapers and some useful filters. It is cumbersome, but needs must for a while.
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I wanted to add a event after my father's death date to my Ancestry tree, which was when his ashes were scattered earlier this year and it warned me the event was after the date of death, yet Ancestry is happy to allow people to brazenly add a hint for the 1851 census for someone born 1620.
Even when I type exact words into FindMyPast I still often get swamped with irrelevant results.
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As a long time user of Ancestry.co.uk, when I entered death and burial events (year), I could then add a separate / different residence (in the same year) and the system would always record residence before death and burial in logical chronological order.
Now, changes by Ancestry place residence after death and burial!
Has anyone else noticed this problem and reported it to Ancestry?
I have just noticed this and it's very frustrating. I have hundreds - perhaps thousands - of profiles with death and burial dates entered this way. It looks very sloppy and I don't want to waste time 'fixing' them. I don't like using 'before' in the date field if I can help it so I don't consider that a proper solution especially when my way has been fine in the twelve years I've been using the website.
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This attachment of a current entry in my Ancestry database is an example of my frustration.
For the many years I have been using Ancestry, events have been in chronological order:
Residence
Death
Burial
Now this recent tweak by the Ancestry technicians have altered many thousands of my individuals to show:
Burial
Death
Residence
Is this a bug they are working on I wonder?
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Is this a bug they are working on I wonder?
I suspect it is a bug - or at least an oversight - rather than a deliberate change.
Ancestry user trees usually have at least one bug at any given time and they tend to be resolved. A couple of years ago there was a bug with custom sources that caused external web links to be garbled, rendering them useless. That lasted a couple of months, I think, and was a major impediment to my usual workflow.
I've raised this issue on the Ancestry Users facebook group and Ancestry rep Crista Cowan frustratingly suggested a workaround - as if the way I enter the info is correct - rather than acknowledging the problem.
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I used to make enquiries using the e-mail address
ancestrysupport@ancestry.co.uk
but this is no longer available.
The support link
https://support.ancestry.co.uk/s/
leads only to static informaton and a 'virtual assistant' called Leif.
Is Facebook the only way to make contact with a member of Ancestry staff?
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Uk support phone number is 0800 7831340. Staff are usually good at raising stuff through their own reporting system, once you’ve convinced them that a) the problem isn’t just you or your tech, and b) that they can actually see it too.
I have tried on both my tablet and on my laptop, so no, this isn’t a problem at our end.
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An Ancestry staff member gave me this link this morning when I contacted them using FB Messenger:
https://support.ancestry.co.uk/s/article/Providing-Feedback-About-Ancestry
I used to make enquiries using the e-mail address
ancestrysupport@ancestry.co.uk
but this is no longer available.
The support link
https://support.ancestry.co.uk/s/
leads only to static informaton and a 'virtual assistant' called Leif.
Is Facebook the only way to make contact with a member of Ancestry staff?
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Just took my own advice, and rang Support.
It appears to be working fine on Google Chrome.
She did submit my "suggestion" that this should work on Firefox and Safari too. I would suggest that as many as possible ring to report this, as they cannot be allowed to push us all into using Chrome.
Completely fail to see why it should work on one browser and not on others??
??? ??? ???
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Ancestry often suggests changing browser when there are problems.
For me, this issue occured without changing my browser (Google Chrome for many years).
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This change is fairly recent, as I have been working on my tree regularly for some time.
If enough users complain, Ancestry may go back to the original settings.
Yes, I noticed the reversal in the past week or so here on Ancestry.ca. Very annoying.
The other date issue for me is that the UK Death Registration sources have the dates in US format (mm/dd/yyyy) instead of UK (dd/mm/yyyy). So any day 12th or less is switched to the month. I have begun to just assume it's switched and put the UK date in my tree. I reported this to Ancestry in March 2024 but so far nothing has changed (not holding my breath).
Ms_C
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Yes, I noticed the reversal in the past week or so here on Ancestry.ca. Very annoying.
The other date issue for me is that the UK Death Registration sources have the dates in US format (mm/dd/yyyy) instead of UK (dd/mm/yyyy). So any day 12th or less is switched to the month. I have begun to just assume it's switched and put the UK date in my tree. I reported this to Ancestry in March 2024 but so far nothing has changed (not holding my breath).
Ms_C
I have never had a date from UK Death Registration in anything other than normal UK format (dd/mm/yyyy).
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My personal database RootsMagic allows me to re-order events manually if necessary. I would like to have this facility with Ancestry.
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Yes, I noticed the reversal in the past week or so here on Ancestry.ca. Very annoying.
The other date issue for me is that the UK Death Registration sources have the dates in US format (mm/dd/yyyy) instead of UK (dd/mm/yyyy). So any day 12th or less is switched to the month. I have begun to just assume it's switched and put the UK date in my tree. I reported this to Ancestry in March 2024 but so far nothing has changed (not holding my breath).
Ms_C
I have never had a date from UK Death Registration in anything other than normal UK format (dd/mm/yyyy).
Hi. Took me a while to find one. It's actually the UK Death Index, not Registration. The person's birthdate is 6 May, and date of death is 1 Dec. On one record, both dates are in the incorrect format, but on the other they are both correct. (Additional sources were found that confirmed the correct dates.)
Ms_C
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That looks like an Ancestry source? And not a UK source?
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That looks like an Ancestry source? And not a UK source?
I don't know, but either way one of them is consistently wrong. The matter has been reported, but nothing has changed.
Ms_C
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Is this a bug they are working on I wonder?
I suspect it is a bug - or at least an oversight - rather than a deliberate change.
Ancestry user trees usually have at least one bug at any given time and they tend to be resolved. A couple of years ago there was a bug with custom sources that caused external web links to be garbled, rendering them useless. That lasted a couple of months, I think, and was a major impediment to my usual workflow.
I've raised this issue on the Ancestry Users facebook group and Ancestry rep Crista Cowan frustratingly suggested a workaround - as if the way I enter the info is correct - rather than acknowledging the problem.
It's because all the dates are in a different format.
If you want them in the correct order, when saving to your tree, I always change the date of death to the 1st of the month in which the burial happened and the residence date to the last day of the previous month and hey presto they are in the correct order. And if you always use the 1st and 30/31st then you will know that it is a manually amended date.
Pheno
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It annoys me like mad that with the UK & Ireland selected the damn system gives USA based results.
Agree and also gives far too many results, not searched for too!
I've also noticed that deaths may now be placed after burials.
Oh dear. I've seen Trees burying the living.