Ancestry
reviews and complaints

Ancestry is a fraudulent company... I sighed up to a 14 day free trial... Cancelled the next day... Was still billed for the month... Called them and had to argue with the cs rep for over an hour... He said they would credit my cc for the amount charged... Never happened... Filed a complaint with the ftc... It has been over a month and they still refuse to give my money back... They should be charged with fraud...

Ancestry.com in violation of the California Consumer Privacy Act. They deliberately take you to broken links and require you to create an account. It still will not allow me to delete Personal information off the site after numerous attempts to the company. This is illegal. The law does not require me to provide any personal info or create an account.

On Monday, July 12th I " chatted" online with an Ancestry customer service rep named Minos. I explained that when I try to access ancestry member trees under the hints section, there are now only three trees listed. this is true with every single page on my family tree. There are sometimes less, but never more. I explained that there were certain people I had been research ing who had twelve to fifteen trees, and now only had three. I provided names.
Minos did not understand, or was unable to help. When I asked who I should contact the next morning to resolve this, he kept repeating the same thing. When I asked for the name of his supervisor, he said no!This is unacceptable!

I was given a subscription for 6 months of ancestry for mother's day 2021. I have yet be able to use it because of all the flaws in the system. I have emailed and talked to customer service about these problems and they have done nothing to correct the issues. This a a big disappointed and cost my daughter 99 dollars for nothing. This has made me so stressed that I do not know if I will get back on their service. Explained in detail to this company so many times. Why don't they listen? My hope is that no one else goes through this.

I've had it with Ancestry. I joined in 2019, it was a mess then and is a worse mess today. Disaster! Legacy Tree advertised on their site because Ancestry got their advertising monies. I spent over $2, 350, with Legacy for 20 hours and they got both of my great grandparents wrong. Then they wanted $3, 000 for 20 more hours. Ancestry is deceitful and told me they weren't with them. Now 23andMe is advertising and saying they are with Legacy Tree and now they are saying they aren't. The message system is a mess1
Ancestry is adding layers which makes things more confusing. After waiting for 55 minutes, I'm lucky to talk to a nasty rep and forget about talking to corporate. I hate this whole system. It's corrupt and a SCAM! There's more to [censored] about, but I am sick of it all. It's all a SCAM!

Feb 16 2021
Ancestry charged two subscriptions to my mastercard (one of which is pending)
I was trying to open one account on free 14 day TRIAL BASIS
Despite cancelling subscription on both, to start over from zero, they still charged me

I called Ancestry and they claim they cannot see my credit card number
Yet on my mastercard I absolutely see the two charges
I asked to speak to a supervisor and they said it was impossible

Where i'm from taking something that does not belong to you is theft!
Allowing "members" to attach other people's hard-earned research without any type of communication should be a violation of every rule ancestry has in place. After all it's not fb!
There is no justification for having nearly 26, 000 unverified "family" members in one of tree, managed by a single person that has four trees going. This "kdc10" managing that massive tree has not even tried to confirm any of those connections and that tree does not have anyone inside of six generations of the primary person with any surname in my tree. Yet this degenerate latched on to my original tree.
This "kdc10" person won't communicate with me constructively or try to identify the connection between the adopted arena g lombard cassidy and anybody in family! Absolutely ridiculous that one person amongst those +25k with a common last name, is one of 36 children born to a couple that does not share her surname!? And there is no spouse or children included?! Wtf

So with more than 25, 900 people in the tree aptly named "arenadna&adoptivefamilytree" contains only one mention of a common surname and zero common info.

Ancestry always "updating" but still can't tell you an exact country in a region.
The results change drastically, one day you're German the next you're Italian. Which is it? If you can't give people accurate results, the first or second time, don't waste our time & money! We didn't buy to guess we spent money to know. "Your DNA doesn't change, but our science does"
Proceeds to change completely
Ancestry basically tells us the results aren't accurate each time.

On 7/17/20 I apparently opened an an account for $149.00 [protected]. I wanted to reactivate my old acct. It appears that on 05/11/20 I opened another acct. In my effort to straighten my problem out. I have been billed $39.99 a month. I have had an acct. Since 2005 as alicelyons50. It has years worth of work with trees named hover, borker, lyons, alice's multi family. There are also other people's trees that connect. Fredericks. The bill I paid $149 for has a user name of asbl48 but it takes me to my alicelyons50 acct. I believe I used [protected]@yahoo for both accounts but I may have used [protected]@aol.com. Somehow I messed up but I only need 1 acct. The one I have all my work in alicelyons50. Please help!

To Whom it may concern: (Ancestry)
June 25, 2015 I ordered FTM 2014, order number [protected]. I could not download it, and asked for a refund or the disk itself. They never sent me one, nor gave me my refund. I had several heart attacks and strokes and was in hospital and rehab for long time. I sent several emails to no avail. I even cancelled my Ancestry subscription that I was paying for monthly due to their lack of integrity.
This is now 2020 and still have not received anything. no disk or refund. I am a widow on fixed income and sacrifice to get little enjoyments in life (Ancestry being one of them). I can't afford to lose money.
They should be ashamed of themselves not even answering my emails, I sent several.
I would like someone to help me with this situation please. I am paralized on one side and have hard time since I live alone.
Thank you for your help.
Marie Kravette
11 Pondview Dr. Apt 9
Patchogue NY 11772
[protected]

Ancestry scams people as often as they think they can get away with it. Idid not renew ancestry when my subscription ran out but they put the charges on my credit card anyway. I called the credit card company and had the charge removed. A month later I find more charges on a credit card I had not given them information on. How many times do I have to tell these people I do not want their services? They even went into my favorites column and removed information I had saved from previous ancestry accounts.

Customer service should be there to help people and not talk over them and hang up on them when a customer becomes frustrated.

Your customer service is very very sad in this day and age. When I can hear the agent say (in the back ground with his British accent) has anyone talked to an American who said she his pissed off ? And then proceed to hang up.

Good Lord - if I hung up up on every customer who was upset when they call my job I'd #1 be fired!

Ancestry you have a looooooooooong way to go with your customer service!
Most likely time to go to another company who offers better Customer Service.

I joined ancestry about 7 months ago did the dna kit and started my family tree. I was very pleased with the progress on the tree going back as far as the 600 AD with some branches. Then one day about 2 weeks ago I went to the site to work on my tree and 99% of the tree was gone. I immediately call ancestry customer service and explained what had happened. After hours of being switched from many different representatives, they could not give an adequate explanation of what had happened to the tree. They refused to take responsibility for the error in their system and to offer compensation. I am very disappointed at their complete disregard. I would be very interested to know if anyone else ha had this experience.

ANC*ANCESTRY.COM has been charging my credit card for two years without my permission. I joined www.ancestry.com about three years ago and I have since cancelled my account but I am still getting charged to my credit card $9.99 each month for this scam ancestry. I want this cancelled today! I believe ANC*ANCESTRY.COM is a scam from another country. I enquired before about it being a scam to take money from innocent consumers, like me, however, not one thing is ever resolved on my credit card and/or account. Please make this a priority as I am sure other people are being affected by this also.

Signed up for the free trial and this wasn't useful (couldn't locate any ancestors) so stopped using it after 1 day. 1 year later I was going through credit card statements and found I had been charged AU$600 by ‘ANC*ANCESTRY.COM'. Thought this was a scam, and then did some investigation. Turns out my free trial was automatically rolled into a paid service without any notification provided to me - no emails, invoices, receipts or mentions I would be charged.

The website says you have to telephone to cancel or receive refunds. However, it is an American number and I live in Australia. Sent them a message and they wrote back that they could not return the charges they took because it was in their dodgy T&Cs. Avoid at all costs. Do not trust this thieving organisation.

Got tired of haveing to up the price for information with this and that price increase. Research DNA companies this one in my opinion is not the best for the money. When you do the test they only tell you relatives in USA. Part of my family come from Canada so they want omore and more money to look up your Canadian relatives. They will keep asking for more and more money. Research DNA compaines the choose the best I made the mistake of using Ancestry.com

I won't say that ancestery is a complete scam it does provide you with the basic information about your lineage and your heritage. However as one who was looking specifically for family members that would link me to my biological father and failed me . It seems ancestry will pull popular DNA from a profile because it's comment to a particular region which can skew the results in giving false information . Example it listed my aunt has a first cousin and my half sister as first cousins because it did not include all Centimorgans. Really I want to use this platform to warn people to dig further because it's not correct

I purchased a dna test for a friend, it was on sale for 69 dollars +shipping, on 10/18/18 in the afternoon, on 10/19/2018, I need to refund it, my friend said does not want to do it, so I call to refund, after a while this sweet lady tells me I have tp pay a 25 dollar fee, are you kidding its not 24 hours, its not shipped, or anything and you are charging 25 dollars, this unreal, people do not cancel I am sure, i bought a kit for my husband, they do help people the kit is 69 dollars or you see it for 59 now a Halloween special, bad cs, here confirm no of transaction is [protected] check it out and see if this is fair not even 24 hours, it would have been sooner but your phones do not open up till 9am, i, m up at 5am fla time, how do you sleep at nite