Saturday 7 May 2011

7th: Ancestry.com exceeding their brief

I'm getting rather annoyed with Ancestry.com at the moment.
Some years ago now I finally succumbed to keeping several trees on ancestry, liking in particular the wonderful hints for sources that may be for the people in the trees.
As I research and find someone/something, I generally now pop the results of those searches into whichever tree is appropriate - keeping my master copy of all data on my own pc still, in TMG.
Of late I've noticed that something seems to have changed with how they treat the input suggestions for the data from a source you've just examined and chosen to attach to someone in your tree.
Instead of limiting the information supplied on the lhs of the add screen to what is available from that source, they seem to now also scoop up whatever other information they seem to have for what looks to them like the same person, and present it in the same add screen, with no indication that it has come from some other source, ie one that you may or may not have viewed, and certainly isn't the one currently being used to add data to your tree.
I think this is grossly misleading, and likely to lead to all sorts of stupid errors in already error-prone trees.
Admit to not having selected the death information I was presented with to see what source it would have attached (I was adding data from some Canadian WWI attestation papers and was presented with death information for the spouse, and a string of children, the only connection any of this had to the source document being the spouse's name as next of kin).

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