RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: andrewalston on Thursday 12 December 24 10:23 GMT (UK)
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In one of my trees I recently added:
Iris Spencer, born "bet Jul 1923 and Sep 1923 • Warrington, Lancashire, England"
Yesterday I glanced at her profile and found it showed 1 hint. To my surprise it showed the record below.
I am at a loss as to how their system deemed tis appropriate.
I eventually reached someone in their "support" department by phone. Although they could see exactly the same as I could, they were unable to see that there was any problem with the hint. Their attitude was to gaslight me. They claimed they would send me a link for me to send detailed information for their technical team. The promised email just had a link to a page in their useless "FAQ" section.
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Perhaps their FAQs should include "Is there anyone at Ancestry who can think logically?".
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I Can only IMAGINE That SOMEWHERE someone skipped a line on the 1939 register and got Iris spencer s details mixed up with an eelderly lady on the same page the details then get put in the sysem and some people blindly copy the same details
sorry 4 capitals
i have caught myself doing this a few times where person is identified by the curser and ive slipped to far from my individual but it shows up at the comparison stage
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I eventually reached someone in their "support" department by phone. Although they could see exactly the same as I could, they were unable to see that there was any problem with the hint.
They were unable to comprehend why you didn't simply accept the hint and add to your family tree. After all, that is what the vast majority of Ancestry users do....
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i find that truly shocking
they should be reprimanded for giving advice like that
they are in the wrong job if they dont understand the basic workings of matches .
I would report that !
Ive always found staff very helpful but only ever enquiring about subs or dna kits to purchase Ive never used their services to question records except maybe to get a clearer copy of a document
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You know that we all symathize with your frustration especially after you too the trouble to phone them!
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As I understand it, Ancestry uses essentially the same search/match methodology as Google - it suggests a hint which another user thought was accurate and linked to someone with the same details as you. So if another Ancestry user has attached that particular document to a person in their tree that has similar details to your person, the hint system will highlight it as a hint for your person too.
I believe it also attaches as a hint any document which another user has added to their tree to a person in their tree who also has a document which you have added to a person in your tree.
The problem, of course, is that this method only provides useful hints if the original user only attaches documents which are in some sense "correct" and as we all know, that is not always the case. Unfortunately this tends to compound the problem where people blindly accept hints thinking it is some clever system that finds the documents that do relate to the person in your tree, resulting in errors being magnified by being copied into multiple trees - which makes them even more likely to appear as hints elsewhere.
Technically speaking, the CS person is correct in the sense that Ancestry didn't glitch in providing that particular hint (assuming someone has added it to a person similar to your "Iris Spencer"). Strictly speaking the hint system has worked the way it is meant to work. On the other hand, common sense suggests they would have wiser to agree with your point that the hint was clearly wrong in this case.
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I have also had this, hints for someone who is totally unrelated to my ancestor purely because others (likely distant cousins) have researched and blatantly accepted the hints as that for the ancestor I am researching. Like an 1851 census entry for our ancestor who died in 1810 when it is someone of the same name and birth county.
To be fair, some Ancestry hints have been a godsend and revealed info I never knew about before, and when I checked further, the details matched.
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And then someone else who received this hint says "yep, that nonsense checks out" and adds it, so the algorithm gives itself a pat on the back.
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Which is why subscribers rightly expect the person who picks up the Ancestry phone to be on top of that, not trailing along with the rest of the "anything goes" group.
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And then someone else who received this hint says "yep, that nonsense checks out" and adds it, so the algorithm gives itself a pat on the back.
Yes like they have traced back to a John and Elizabeth Smith who lived in rural Somerset in the early 1800s and there is a burial flagged up on the Ancestry hints of an Elizabeth Smith in rural Norfolk in 1810, and a note says "Wife of John", and they think "Yes she must have died in Norfolk then".
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I had several strange hints including a High Sheriff of Nottingham, Essex Lords / Knights and Mary Tudor !
(John Hacker followed his father as High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire for 1674)
No explanation was forthcoming, I closed my account.
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Ancestry isn't interested in providing accurate information. Only in exploiting other people's "research", no matter how inaccurate, for its own profit. But that so-called hint takes the biscuit.
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I provided appropriate feedback for my phone conversation, explaining that gaslighting was inappropriate, and that retraining about the real world (besides customer service) might be necessary.
A week later, I disconnected this Iris Spencer from the tree, being replaced by an Iris who had a matching 1939 Register record (found using FindMyPast), marriage and death entries.
The stupid hint remained for a further 10 days, but now the offender has hints which relate to my other Iris.
I have still to receive an email allowing me to submit technical details. In fact the only emails have been those promoting their DNA product.
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Often we can hit brickwalls in the 1800s and early 1900s, so imagine how it will be in the 1700s or before where records get more sparse. Many famous people of the time cannot be traced before they became famous, or their first marriage. Yet many will just accept Ancestry hints and think it solves the mystery, whether in the 1500s or 1900s.