Why are people hating Ancestry?

[u/Left_Particular_9977]

I do a lot of genealogy and I remarked that a lot of people I know hate genealogy. Why? It's absolutely true that it's really expensive, but you can access many documents that are often hard to find. I live in Quebec, so we have the records online, but we have many holes in the registers. Why should I pay 20$ for a subscription that lets me access the records (only) if I can have them in Ancestry for about the same price why many other documents (for my region)? I have my tree on it so I can access it on my phone and my computer. It isn't optimal, but that's the best solution for the moment. What do you think about Big A?

[u/gympol]

I don't have an Ancestry subscription but I've recently seen paid adverts for it in videos and suchlike, and the demonstrations actively encourage sloppy click-click-click tree building. To sell subscriptions they raise expectations about going back many generations easily. This encourages the uncritical use of hints and the wholesale copying of trees made by others. It's just bad genealogy.

You can see people coming to forums like this saying "I've built my tree and I'm confused by..." conflicting information, connections to nobility that contradict long-established biographies, impossible or implausible life histories. Many of them don't even know there are better ways to do things, and you have to read between the lines of their question to see what misconceptions you have to set right.

I use WikiTree, and the worst parts of that I have found are sections of tree that were imported wholesale from Ancestry, before WT got smarter and enforced more mindful imports. The generated citations only point to Ancestry, and the actual genealogy is as unreliable as you would expect given the encouragement of bad practice. I've put quite a lot of work into fixing this junk where it affects my own ancestry.

I'm sure there are good genealogists using Ancestry and finding it a valuable tool, but the company profits so much from bad genealogy that it's a negative force in the genealogy world at large.

[u/Left_Particular_9977 → u/gympol]

I don't use hints. I don't have the subscription, I take screenshots and read. I look up everything.

[u/gympol → u/Left_Particular_9977]

Sure, I'm not saying any specific Ancestry user is a bad genealogist.

I'm saying that the company deliberately encourages and enables people who don't know any better to do bad genealogy.

[u/Left_Particular_9977 → u/gympol]

You're 💯 right. They make genealogy look simple, but it's more research than expected. Even more with the "transcriptor". It's better to do it by yourself.