tl;dr: Folks want to use ancestry to see where and how it goes. What do they need to know? Is there anything to avoid?
I’m not wild on the idea of submitting DNA swabs for a lot of reasons, the recent issues with genealogy.com’s data being a great example. What of tracing family tree by liniage?
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The free trial STATTS with ‘sign in using the following services’ I haven’t gone past that point because I don’t want to hand anything over til they show me where they want payment information, because free trials are seldom free and.
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The payment page for full signups constnatly ‘reassure’ that you don’t have to do anything each month it auto renews. my family’s gotten burned on auto renewals before where the other end basically refused to stop taking money out in spite of trying to end services.
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Anyone know about the library edition how to find out what libraries have access to that and what’s needed to sign in that way?
The thing to avoid is to not give your DNA to a company that will sell it the very instant the money is worth more to them than their reputation.
It’s owned by the Mormon church, and that alone should steer you away from it. You don’t want the Mo’s to have your DNA.
Just a quick recap of how shitty they are:
Holocaust victims and Queen Mother posthumously baptized by Mormons
The LDS Church Released “Egregious and Onerous” New Policies Restricting Trans Mormons
Mormon church fined for scheme to hide $32 billion investment portfolio
I believe this is innacurate. Do you have proof that ancestry is currently owned by the Mormon church?
Wiki says Ancestry is owned by GIC Private Limited and The Blackstone Group since 2021.
I know the Mormon company has their greedy little tentacles in many businesses so I wouldn’t be surprised if they somehow are connected with Ancestry but I’d need to see that first.
Tangent - Fuck that business (LDS Church) that masquerades as a religion.
That’s fair, it does appear that the church itself never owned Ancestry.com outright, so I concede I was wrong on that, however this article from the Harvard School of Divinity states that they did own it (see Mormons, Genetics, & Digitized Data:
" In 2001, Mormon billionaire James Sorenson started one of the earliest genetic test kit companies, Relative Genetics, in part due to his religious interests.It was later bought by Ancestry.com, another Mormon company. While today, Ancestry is a publicly traded company, it uses LDS church records and the IGI. All LDS church members receive free memberships, and they can use their account to send relatives they find on Ancestry.com directly to the LDS church for a proxy baptism with the click of a button."
While yet another article states : Is Ancestry.com owned by the Mormon Church?:
"Since many of the digitized records on Ancestry.com can be accessed at FamilySearch, many people assume that the company Ancestry is owned by the LDS church. This is not the case! However, the two organizations have done massive amounts of collaborative work throughout the years. In fact, if you are an LDS member, you have free access to Ancestry’s World Edition. You can also obtain free access at different municipal libraries and other non-religious institutions.
The company still to this day continues to grow, and though its past was highly influenced by people in the LDS church, the company has never been owned by the church itself.
However, the company has truly been a pioneer in the online subscription business model. Today, Ancestry is considered a major technology company rather than a genealogical company. Though the company has done numerous amount of collaborations with the LDS church’s non-profit organization Familysearch.org, it has never been owned by the church itself."
This article points out how Ancestry.com and FamilySearch are often confused (FamilySearch is in fact owned by the Mo’s) Ancestry’s Associations with FamilySearch:
"Ancestry’s Associations with FamilySearch I think one of the reasons that people think Ancestry is owned by the LDS church is that they mix it up with FamilySearch.org.
Who owns Family Search? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Like Ancestry, Family Search is a global online genealogy service based in Provo, Utah.
The two rivals have a history of partnership and collaboration.
The LDS operates a global network of Family History Centres for genealogy research. Members get free access to Ancestry.com services from those centers.
In 2013, Ancestry and FamilySearch started a significant collaboration in access to archives across both sites.
When you’re logged into Ancestry and searching for records, the results may include documents that are indexed by FamilySearch.
Is Ancestry.com Owned By The Mormon Church? Why do people mistakenly think that Ancestry is owned by Mormons?
Is it just because Ancestry and FamilySearch are two online genealogy giants headquartered in Utah? No, I think there’s more to it than that.
The original buyers of “Ancestry, inc” (Paul Allen and Dan Taggart) were both members of the Church of Latter-day Saints.
Also, because the company is based in Utah, many of the staff were drawn from the Mormon community.
Brigham Young University looms large in this regard. Unlike Ancestry, it is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I’ve already mentioned that Allen and his business partner were BYU alumni. A sizeable number of local Ancestry staff are alumni."
So it appears ownership was never their thing, but a heavy influence remains. I assume that if Mo’s are running the show, or did at some point, that the church has de facto control over the business, because the people running the company would just bend over for the church at any point, whether that means giving them access to the DNA database unofficially, allowing them to search it any time for any reason, etc.
Thanks for this. As an exmo, this sort of post legitimately warms my heart. Spread their culty dirty laundry far and wide.
I’m so sorry it had to be part of your life experience, but good on you for getting out of there!
When they go bust they will sell your data.
If not sooner
why wait? they sell it whenever they please
Personally, it’s not worth it. Giving up your DNA can be used against you. People can perform “social proof” phishing attacks on you by claiming sibling relationships. In the USA, law enforcement can use ancestry.com data to aid them in an investigation. So, if you leave some DNA at a crime scene (guilty or not) you might get caught up in the investigation.
You can also get caught up in the information breaches that seem inevitable with these things.
Plus: Ancestry.com is not necessarily as accurate as it is purportedly advertised. DNA doesn’t have magic labels that tell us what it represents or where it came from. The only way to associate certain aspects of DNA with a particular gene, region, etc. is by comparing it to large sample sizes of people that exhibit the features you’re seeking out. So, basically lets say you want to know if you come from Scotland. The way they would accomplish that is they would collect DNA from tons of people who - at least anecdotally - claim they are from Scotland. They then use that as a baseline for “Scottish DNA”. When you submit your DNA sample, they look for markers that are unique to those people who claimed they were from Scotland. The less DNA they have from a particular race/region, the less accurate they can be. I’m not saying Ancestry.com is lying. Their methodology makes sense and across broad strokes will give you a reasonably accurate genealogy. They are also capable of validating siblings/cousins thanks to DNA matching. But it’s only as good as the data they have. The more data they have, the more accurate it will be. But that’s probably not public information and would be impossible to tell without access to their PII data. They might have 0% of data from people in Kazakhstan or Laos or Papua New Guinea. So, it’s possible you have ancestry in places they currently can’t know about.
It’s just not worth it because it opens you up to a lot of risk and the reward is dubious information about your family history. They might know where you’re from, but they can’t give you a 100% ancestral lineage. You might discover lost siblings, cousins, etc. but it’s not really that uncommon (so who cares?)
Lastly, the cost is just silly. They make you pay so they can have access to your most personal data? That’s wild to me. They should pay you.
Just my 2 cents though.
My father has been working on WikiTree for years now. He has traced one family branch back to the 1200s I want to say and he stays busy a few hours every day updating info he finds online about grave markers and historical family facts world wide.
It’s not going to be as slick looking as Ancestry.com but it’s got all the same info if not more and you don’t need to give them a dime (or any DNA).
Some thoughts, as someone who has used ancestry.com in the past:
- Do NOT submit your DNA to them! If all your family wants is to trace your family back for several generations, in most cases you can do that with old-school research. Not providing DNA doesn’t usually prohibit that. And as others have said, these companies are not trustworthy when it comes to being keepers of genetic information.
- You are right, the free trial on ancestry.com is a hook in to get your subscription, with the hope on their end that you will forget about it and and up paying for months on end while not using their services. It’s basically like a gym membership, but for history information.
- That said, it’s not that difficult to cancel an ancestry.com subscription. They make you jump through several screens and try to persuade your to keep it going, but it’s not insurmountable, and I’ve cancelled and renewed and then cancelled my subscription with them a few times.
- They do have an exceptional amount of genealogical information on hand, at least for Western researchers. I’ve found some surprising things about my ancestors on there that I couldn’t find elsewhere.
- For libraries and subscription level, it depends on what your needs are. They bundle them into subscription packages. If you think your ancestors have been in America for several generations I would just go with the cheaper American subscription. If you have ancestors who came from Europe a few generations back then you might want to go with a broader subscription plan that covers European sources. If you want to trace ancestors back from Africa or Asia you are going to be SOL regardless, because genealogy sources from those areas are usually very bad.
- One thing to note, in case this is a problem for you: ancestry.com at least used to be owned by or managed by the LDS church (the Mormons). And they have a pretty sordid history when it comes to the exploitation of women and girls, and (like quite a few other religions) have done and continue to do some very sketchy stuff in general.
Hope this helps.
It autorenews and it’s relatively expensive.
I wouldn’t do that DNA test, because it’s really sensitive data.
WikiTree is a free alternative to the genealogical database. The genealogy nerd in my life says that its data is a bit better. Ymmv.
The LDS church is big into genealogy and has a competitor called FamilySearch. No submitting DNA or anything, it’s actual genealogical research. I believe it’s free as well (could be wrong)
We found out I had an unknown half-brother because my grandpa decided to do one of these. My grandpa was trying to see how much of his Native American ancestry would come up. He is, supposedly, half Wyandot. It showed 0% Native American ancestry. Make of that what you will.
And yes, they’ll absolutely end up selling your data at some point.
Their cybersecurity is dogshit too. If the government can’t keep people from stealing your digital records, no fucking way that gimmeDNA.com is going to do a better job.
I have a friend who has to keep going in there to re-correct bad data and bad relationships that people keep re-adding. They think they’re helping, but they’re not, they’re just contaminating the data and the site keeps letting them do so.
I use it and like it. DNA and all. Yes it’s expensive. I generally pay for a month, then let it expire for a few months while I catch up, then renew as needed.
It is the 900 pound gorilla of the hobby. If you want to get DNA matches, it’s the first choice by far. And it has enabled me to learn an enormous amount about my family - and my wife’s, and several friends who are interested.
If genealogy is your thing, do it. If you only want to half-ass it, there are alternatives.
Same. I was adopted as an infant, and I actually used all the DNA sites to triangulate my birth family (some nice folks, some asses). I did it over ten years ago, but it would have been a lot easier today. I think it hits a lot of people, especially on a platform like Lemmy, in their Sci-Fi dystopia feels in an inchoate kind of way that makes them recoil, and it’s not that there isn’t any potential for abuse, just that this is a genie that’s very much out of the bottle. Frankly, if anything truly awful is going to be done with autosomal DNA, the people who want to do it will simply mandate it.
Records-wise, it’s a large universe and impressively interconnected. I’ve learned a lot about all of my families (birth, adopted, marriage), and I was able to track down the documentation necessary to support a successful application get an EU passport for my wife (her company paid for it once she told them it was plausible), and therefore our daughter. I gather that I’ll be eligible for one myself in the near future, as she was legally always a citizen, and therefore she will soon have been married for twenty years.
If my paternal side were more forthcoming, I might have been able to work something out with them for a couple of other countries, as my great-grandfather was an illegal immigrant from Germany who jumped ship from a freighter in the 1920s and married a girl whose family fled the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire after WWI. Then their kid married a Canadian nurse who was actually born in the “Dominion of Newfoundland” before confederation. Somehow this ended up creating Floridians… 🤷
Also, there’s a good chance your goony-ass yearbook photos are on Ancestry (among other places).
I’ve resolved one adoption mystery and have two more under investigation. It’s very rewarding work.
I’m also working on Euro citizenship for me and my siblings. We may be too late - some international policies are changing and we may be already shut out.
Yikes, aren’t you afraid they’re going to pull a 23andme and sell all your DNA info to Saudi Arabia and God knows who else?
No. Ancestry is the big fish. 23 tried to swim in deep water without a solid established cash flow.
Also, how does someone having access to my (already public) tree matches do additional harm? My real name is globally unique. I’m Very easy to find and ID.
