Is ancestry.com Safe?

Behind a paywall for most of its content. Completely safe to use. Good resources. Don't like when they hook up with affiliate sites that you have to then pay additional monies for - i.e. newspapers.com. It seems like some of the affiliates are included with your subscription but some are not.

AncCom is a great wealth of genealogical data. You only need to be minimally computer literate and able to type or copy and paste stuff. It was sad to learn the current 2020 US. Census has less lineage info in regards to names and origins and migrations (e.g, born in England, Norway, Moon Base Gamma etc). If someone has legal documents such as military, marriage, school yearbooks, death certificates, cemetery plots, etc. You can build a compendium set. Tip: It helps to be able to use a good screen capture app and a good graphics app so you can easily collect images and text relevant to each individual. It can take some time to do even the most basic research (Boo 2020 Census!). You may expect to find documents that are difficult to read or translate the more you go into the past. Hey kids,.. do you know there was a time when humans did not have electricity and keyboards? I was astounded to learn about a Great Grandmother, known locally as “Martha. The Quaker Woman" was named in many records of The Church of the Brethren . This is interesting because I have no brothers and neither had my Mother or my Father. We had lots of sisters ergo, aunts. So, do not give up on your efforts, you might be surprised to also find interesting surnames and origins you never could imagine having. We are fortunate in our era of DNA science. Lineages will be precise into the future. Your future progeny will be grateful for your efforts. You may become somebody’s “Nth Great DNA match as an Uncle, Cousin or what the heck. Who knows?

This site first requires one to sign up with an email address and then uses bait-and-switch tactics, demanding money after they show search returns, as if they have found your family information, when in fact, there are many false hits and you will have to pay first before determining how many false leads there are. They also employ the book-fo-the-month-club tactics of using automatically reoccurring charges on a credit card unless you cancel their "free trial" before the trial period is over and even then there are numerous reports of them processing billing even after cancellation. As of 2009, ancestry.com also became affiliated with "mylife.com" – a well-known scam site. Pay a genealogical service instead of wasting your money on this untrustworthy outfit. There are serious cocerns with what this company can do with the unwary’s DNA too. Their TOS gives them complete control over their client’s DNA information. If you deal with them, you lose your privacy completely. Additionally, this site has rigged Google searches to place their site amongst the first few hits though there is often no mention of a name one is searching for. See: ***** *****

***** is a subscription-focused service that really, really, REALLY wants you to sign up for that two-week trial hoping that you'll forget to cancel. However, it is the most convenient, user-friendly, and thorough of the available online options for family history research. The site is fine if you READ the terms before you commit. If you typically skip T&C before you it "Sign Me Up", you are going to be incredibly frustrated when you get your credit card statement.

Ancestry is very useful because it aggregates so much genealogical information on a single website, but it is expensive to subscribe. For many years, I totally trusted Ancestry in terms of accuracy and user privacy protection. Unfortunately, I have now found pictures that I uploaded appearing on other user trees and places where they don't belong. There have been other incidents which I did not expect given the privacy settings that I selected for my account.

I have been a member of ***** since 2000. It's a bit expensive, but it's so worth it for genealogy nuts like me. It's all I ask for at Christmas each year. Also, I don't get spammed at all! I'm not sure what these people are talking about. As for the reviews about privacy, never has anything from my Private trees been leaked. None of the photos or information has been used in any other tree or other sites that I have found. I think this is probably user error on their part. Also, I don't put anything about living people on there that isn't already public information. So... don't want it taken? Don't add it!

Beware, this is what happened when Google Diagnostic visited the site. "Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 27 time(s) over the past 90 days. What happened when Google visited this site? Of the 5447 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 56 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2013-12-09, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on ***** Malicious software includes 122 trojan(s), 79 scripting exploit(s), 19 exploit(s). Malicious software is hosted on 1 domain(s), including ***** This site was hosted on 28 network(s) including AS36175 (MYFAM-DC1), AS20021 (LNH-INC), AS13791 (INTERNAP-BLK3)."

***** is inexorably becoming a cartel on internet genealogy. They cooperate with their only real competition--familysearch.org--and may be more closely connected with them than now apparent. Hopefully they won't ruin their latest acquisition--findagrave.com. And, yes, as in many other comments here, once they learn your email address, you'll hear from them forever.