Ancestry Pro Tools

[Biggles50]

I have signed up for the Pro Tools at £7.99 a month.

Looking through the features I am miffed that the Tree Checking is part of the subscription and not a feature that is standard within any Ancestry subscription.

In a Profile page there is a circle with a ! inside it and if there is an error there is a white circle at the 2 o’clock position to signify this. 

There are multiple ways to access Pro Tools and on the home page you get a Box inside which there are Shortcuts.

I was interested in duplicates so I filtered down to show them and of the 16 presented only 1 was an actual duplicate, in another shown as a duplicate there is Maria and her twin sister Rosa, so obviously the fact that they share the same birth details is enough for Pro Tools to report it as a duplicate.

The features available are:-
Tree Checker
Enhanced Shared Matches ( DNA use only )
Smart Filters
Charts & Reports
Tree Mapper
Tree Insights
Additional tools for Fan Charts.

Being an advocate of incorporating DNA lead research the Enhanced Shared Matches is certainly of interest.  This is when we can look at a specific DNA Match (Say Fred Smith) and when we look at the Shared Matches as well as seeing the cM I share with each of the Shared Matches it also lists the cM value that “Fred Smith” shares with each of them.  Useful to help narrow down the MRCA that is likely to be the initial subject of research.

The:-
Smart Filters
Charts & Reports
Tree Mapper
Tree Insights
Additional tools for Fan Charts.

For me have limited usage, I have all these features and many more all of which are much superior in Family Tree software.

Is it worth £7.99 a month, well for me a resounding no.  One month Subscription will be more than enough to do what I want with the facility.  The Enhanced Shared Matches is IMO the only useful feature so far. 

What would be beneficial from a DNA user point of view is it Pro Tools included all the tools that are available within Gedmatch, now that would be worth £7.99 a month.

Now £50 buys you the Platinum version of Roots Magic or £40 for the Standard one, into which you can import all your Ancestry Family Tree including all media, images etc and within the software there are some pretty useful Error Checking and reporting tools included as standard.  So a few months of not subscribing to Pro Tools and using Roots Magic and the software has paid for itself.

[ms_canuck]

I signed up for Pro Tools today at $10.00 CAD (Edit: $10.00 USD!), and I am of the exact same opinion.  Tree Checker should be part of the regular subscription.  MyHeritage has a really good one that I use occasionally and then match the results back to Ancestry.  A good check is are siblings born too close together, are the parents too young/old, etc.  I find that helpful.

The advanced DNA / Matches is also interesting.  Some matches that had zero shared matches now have tons!  Not sure how this will help at present, but it's interesting nonetheless.

I have tried Family Tree software and honestly I have not been able to figure out how to use it properly.  I'm not able now to fork out the money, so I'll see how I fare with Pro Tools.

[Biggles50]

I have now looked through the four main family trees that I have and found as regarding duplicates:-

Tree 1 has 500 people and 12 shown as duplicates, 0 were in fact duplicates

Tree 2 has 5446 people and 72 shown as duplicates, 0 are duplicates

Tree 3 has 8202 people and 139 shown as duplicates, 3 are duplicates

Tree 4 has 900 people and 0 duplicates.

No apparent reason why the Tree Checker is reporting duplicates especially where forenames are very different.

In one branch of my family Annie Mary was a popular family name and girls born to different parents but in a similar time frame are listed as duplicates.

In a Census one Brother is called Jim and yet another older brother is called Jamie and these have been flagged as duplicates.

Alas there is no easy was to remove them as each one has to be reviewed and then “not a duplicate” selected.

Still not impressed.