Anyone gone onto the 'new' Ancestry.com?

[andycand]

Hi

My tree is not on Ancestry, thank goodness, but if it was then defaulting to a users location wouldn't work. I live in Australia but most of my research is England & Scotland. Whilst I tend to put the Country in for Scotland, Canada, USA and, funnily enough, Australia, I haven't included England for many of my English relatives so many of my English place names would default to their Australian namesake.

I'm wondering if they are trying to create a standard format across the website (eg drop down menu for birthplace on Censuses) so that hints make sense. Unfortunately this won't work as the place  of an event can vary depending upon the source.

Andy

[jon541]

Surely it is up to US to make sure that our ancestors are living in the correct country, and not rely on a machine to do it for us.

And so it is (up to us), if you explicitly state the country.  After all, to reference some of the examples quoted above, you wouldn't just enter 23 Acacia Gardens, Gillingham on your tree as the address, you would add Dorset or Kent as appropriate to avoid possible confusion. And if you had a mix of English and Canadian ancestors, why would you assume that it would be possible to logically determine which London-dwellers in your tree lived in the town of that name in Ontario or in the English capital?

Frankly, the suggestions about defaulting to the user's login country are not well thought through:  97% of my ancestors are English but there will be a lot of people in whichever country Ancestry operates, particularly in Australia, Canada and the US with their history of immigration, who have a much less heavily-weighted provenance and where defaulting makes no sense.

Defaulting of any information is a bad idea ... it's a little like the rather clichéd axiom that to assume makes an ass of u and me.

I think a lot of the annoyance expressed arises from the fact that Ancestry have chosen to interpret and understand addresses - a very valid point and an annoyance which obviously could have been  avoided by the simple expedient of accepting addresses as entered.  However, if you are checking whether anyone else is researching SMITH in LONDON, England and you don't want your results to include a lot of hits for LONDON, Canada then you can't have it both ways!

[sunflower]

Where has the comment box disappeared to ?

Carol

[maggbill]

I took quite a while to find the "Comments".  When you have the individuals page open there is a button towards top right hand side - "Tools" - drop down list gives option to "View Comments".  Not impressed with this at all, the comments on old version were much more obviously positioned at bottom of page - my relies who aren't as au fait with Ancestry will never find that I have put some really important information under the rather well hidden "Comments" area.

[Lisajb]

But if - forgive me - you have sources for an ancestor, birth from UK BMD, all the census records English census, marriage and death UK BMD, surely then the powers that be of ancestry could see that your ancestor was a UK resident and not place them in the USA or wherever counterpart same named location?

Maybe I am over simplifying things?

[maggbill]

Hi lisajb

The problem is that - the "powers that be" are the computer programmers, who I think have released this trial version before they really had "done their homework" lolol....

[Lisajb]

You'd think for something as big as ancestry is, they'd have a mirror site to test things on - obviously not!

[sunflower]

Thanks Maggbill

I found the comment box.  It's well hidden

Carol

[KGarrad]

A couple of points:

1. Ancestry is an American company, with vastly more US members than UK members. Do you really think they care about the UK?

2. Ancestry are a commercial company, NOT a service provider. They have attracted you to take out membership - what you do once you are a member isn't really a priority for them?

3. I hardly think the programmers had any say in the matter. Like most big companies, there are Systems Analysts, Business Analysts, and Testers. And they are almost certainly working to impossible deadlines set by senior management, who (usually!) haven't got a clue!

You would think that some of the banking sites here in the UK, would also have mirror testing sites? And look how well recent upgrades to their systems have gone!!