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Ancestry

1.6

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Ancestry Reviews Summary

Ancestry has a rating of 1.6 stars from 637 reviews, indicating that most customers are generally dissatisfied with their purchases. Reviewers dissatisfied with Ancestry most frequently mention customer service, free trial and credit card. Ancestry ranks 54th among Genealogy sites.

service
173
value
169
shipping
73
returns
89
quality
153

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Washington
1 review
1 helpful vote
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SCAM
July 26, 2022

Save your money it's all a scam! According to them I have no family and I know my immediate family has used them even my daughter who I know is my daughter does not come up? Did try to reach out to them with no luck! Plan and simple this company is a scam!

Date of experience: July 26, 2022
North Carolina
1 review
2 helpful votes
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Don't trust the 14 day free trail
July 26, 2022

I recently bought a DNA test for my father as a birthday present. When it came through we wanted to be able to get in contact with new family members. Sadly you have to purchase, so we tried the free trial and I was charged before the trial ended. I called twice about it being canceled was gave a confirmation number that did not work. Don't trust ancestry they'll charge you anyway. They tried to put blame on a old account I had from early May last year that I had stopped. You can see from the pics I cancelled and was still charged. I was charged 8 days before the free trail ended, which put me in the negative. I'm paid monthly so yeah this sucks big time!

Date of experience: July 26, 2022
GB
1 review
2 helpful votes
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Ripping off company
July 24, 2022

Ancestry is ripping off the DNA members. They arbitrarily debit their monthly fee, often several times.
Furthermore, you no longer have an overview of DNA matches if you do not use the payment service.
Third, they are constantly changing their policy while the company - bought by Goldmann Sachs - is generating profit with my DNA.

Date of experience: July 24, 2022
Australia
1 review
0 helpful votes
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Ancestry have a monopoly on the market. False advertising - I recently got a subscription to all Australian and UK records. Except it's not all the records - it excludes Newspapers and other databases.
Poor service and very expensive, especially considering you give them the content.

Date of experience: July 23, 2022
Washington
1 review
1 helpful vote
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My review makes about at much sense as the headline. Twice I've sent my spit into ancestry.com. Twice I've waited for the results only to be told they couldn't give me any results. I'd be fine with that normally. If I sent my spit to you and asked you to tell me where I came from and you said you had no idea and stop sending me your spit I'd understand, but ancestry.com keeps asking me to pay them to send my spit to them and then they take months to figure out nothing. Don't get my hopes up is all I'm asking. Now my uncle did the spit test and he loved it so I know sometimes they can tell you if you're from Norway or China but I keep spitting and waiting and I'm upset that they treat me like I'm not a human or something.

Date of experience: July 22, 2022
GB
1 review
3 helpful votes
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If I could rate zero I would. I missed cancelling the free trial cut off by 12 hours and the unhelpful customer service agent "Joe" told me there was nothing he could do about it.

It is clearly a strategy hoping people will forget to cancel to make money. You don't just pay for 1 month, you get the luxury of paying for 6 months = £69.

Obviously Joe denies the company uses this strategy, however if that wasn't the case why wouldn't they refund the money...

I didn't want to continue using the website as I found it to be completely unintuitive.

Date of experience: July 20, 2022
Oregon
1 review
8 helpful votes
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Not worth the money
July 17, 2022

Horrible customer service, the service itself is not even close to worth 40$ a month. It's a ridiculous setup hard to navigate and the hints after the first one are mostly the exact same material from different places I don't need to know the same thing 20 times. Not user friendly, and the free trial has no notification so don't expect to be warned other then in reviews.

Date of experience: July 17, 2022
Colorado
1 review
7 helpful votes
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Total scam
July 15, 2022

I got no where with my trial, canceled my account and they still charged me. They refused to give a refund, complete scam, do not use.

Date of experience: July 15, 2022
Missouri
2 reviews
25 helpful votes
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I signed up for monthly payments with ancestry. I was told that the amount would not change sand at the end of 6 months I could continue the membership or drop it at no charge. At the end of 6 months, I cancelled my membership. They charged me $25 plus tax to end my membership although I had paid for 6 months and so had fulfilled the contract. Probably need to stay away from them.

Date of experience: June 30, 2022
California
3 reviews
0 helpful votes
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The service failed miserably to obtain documents pertaining to my mother and father and my mother's parents and siblings. It is an utter waste of money. Atop of that, they charged $25 to cancel their horrible service.

Date of experience: June 27, 2022
California
1 review
13 helpful votes
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Liar, thieves, and snake oil salesman
June 23, 2022

If you are AFRICAN American, do not use this site. I am sorry that certain Afri an Americans are promoting this company. They are using slavery to profit with lies and inaccurate DNA testing. I attempted to cancel my account only to find that they were still charging me 79.99 months later. In my opinion go to Mormon site, it is free and you will find actual records. Ancestry should be sued in a class action suit, in my opinion. Let's get that started.

Date of experience: June 23, 2022
Michigan
2 reviews
9 helpful votes
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I signed up for a free trial, and then canceled my membership the same day. I was charged after 2 weeks and somehow my membership was active again. I smoke to a representative that told me I could not get a refund.

PayPal gave me one, so sucks for them I guess! :)

Be careful, after some digging I found out they do this to a lot of people.

Date of experience: June 22, 2022
Massachusetts
1 review
6 helpful votes
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Blackstone Group
June 20, 2022

I am a 14-year member of Ancestry. Since the Blackstone Group has taken over the dependability and speed have sharply decreased Many of the new "additions and improvements" do not work properly. Like a lot of companies that are bought out by big business it is the $ that is important not the customer.

Date of experience: June 19, 2022
Colorado
1 review
3 helpful votes
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I use to love ancestry.com and have been a subscriber for many years but this is my last subscription renewal. Since the last OS update on Safari, I have been unable to open records that I access through the leaf clue on Family Tree Maker. I have contacted Ancestry.com and they told me to use Google Chrome. It is a lot more trouble research that way so I will not renew. I guess Ancestry does not care if they lose subscribers. The picture below shows what happens when I click on a document e.g. census record.

Date of experience: June 18, 2022
Oregon
1 review
3 helpful votes
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Expensive as Hell
June 16, 2022

Do NOT get a free trial with your purchase of a DNA kit. It will renew and you will NOT get a refund. Who the hell pays $80 for a three month subscription? It's $#*!ing ridiculous. I might as well just thrown that in the trash.

Date of experience: June 16, 2022
Canada
1 review
2 helpful votes
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Please avoid ancestry!
June 16, 2022

I signed up for a free trial and was charged anyway. Customer service was circuitous and completely unhelpful.

Date of experience: June 16, 2022
Arizona
1 review
0 helpful votes
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What/Why?
June 13, 2022

Garbage. Pay for what? DNA... ok fine. Look, I'm 42% whatever; who the hell is my Fathers Mother? Nothing? WTF did I just pay for?

Date of experience: June 13, 2022
California
1 review
2 helpful votes
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If I could give it a no star I would. They are so $#*!ty with customer service that I would be ashamed to run a business this way.

Date of experience: June 10, 2022
South Carolina
2 reviews
3 helpful votes
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I found the site to be a bit cumbersome and hard to use. Multiple times when I clicked a hint leaf it would take me to another outside site that wanted yet another fee to access the data. I was shocked that they had the audacity to charge $25 to cancel my membership. I won't be going back nor do I recommend this site at all.

Date of experience: June 4, 2022
Maryland
1 review
2 helpful votes
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Membership
May 21, 2022

I did the Ancestry DNA a few years back. I recently paid for a 6 month membership and suddenly I can't see any Common ancestors to my matches and can't see my thrulines and it wants to charge me extra for newspaper clippings. As if that's not frustrating enough, I spoke to two different people on the chat help line and one person on the phone. None of them have a clue how to fix it!

Date of experience: May 21, 2022