11 ms·

Deleting the Family Tree – Ancestry.com erased 10 years of correspondence

190 points by uptown 12y ago

danso 12y ago
tl;dr: You know how when fly-by-night growth-hacking startups suddenly shut down and do little to help their users export their data because the users never had to pay a dime to run the servers, and someone always comments, "If you're not paying, you're the product, not the customer"? This is not one of those situations. Ancestry.com charged as much as $240 annually for its service [1]. Furthermore, the MyFamily.com social network was just one small part of Ancestry.com, meaning the parent company still has the money (and I would think, the actual servers/backups) to make its paying customers whole here. What the OP describes is a seriously incompetent handling of a shutdown...and one of the variety that is most painful for customers. [1] http://corporate.ancestry.com/press/press-releases/2004/01/myfamily.com-inc.-exceeds-1.5-million-paid-subscriptions/ http://corporate.ancestry.com/press/press-releases/2004/01/m...
- jqm 12y ago
  My Family had years of chat history and photos on "MyFamily.com" when they shut down. This included information from members who have now passed away. I agree fully, their handling of it was insensitive and incompetent and I'll never have anything to do with any of the "Ancestry" products again. Fortunately we found Spokt.com which (after a few rocky starts) was able to "sort of" import most of the data into our new Spokt account. I feel terrible for those families who didn't and permanently lost a large chunk of their family history.
- sp332 12y ago
  You know how when fly-by-night growth-hacking startups suddenly shut down and do little to help their users export their data because the users never had to pay a dime to run the servers Yeah, this is a shitty thing to do to any users. Always make sure there's a way for them to export their data. After all, it isn't really yours - they just let you have it because you seemed trustworthy. Don't betray that.
ddingus 12y ago
That's pretty terrible. Well, there is a whole family who will look at hosted services with a much more jaded eye now. Who wouldn't? Truth is, this kind of garbage devalues everybody. When a large family like this loses out in such a painful way, word gets around. Clearly they are not alone either. People who tend to be into this stuff are very seriously into it. Understandable. It matters. Future offerings, however well their intent and execution might be, will have to work to overcome the painful experiences. And that is just a waste. One thing nagging at me though. Did they really just delete it? Seems that having a fall back would make great sense, if anything, for legal reasons. Or maybe it's better to have it really, really gone. Limit the potentials, so to speak? From time to time, I export various things. Just ordinary worry, but I'm reasonably informed. Who here isn't? Perhaps ordinary people really do need to advance to the next level of literacy. "The basics" today are different. In some ways, simpler. In other ways, potentially more complex. Just saw danso comment. Yeah, my thoughts too. It was possible to treat people right. Do they really just not care? If this were me, I would have a very hard time sleeping at night, particularly given some options. It was easy enough to set up and make the money...
- EGreg 12y ago
  Word should get around. Centralized services suck. I long for the days when people cared that the internet was decentralized, and some of the best apps were too. Email, the Web, even IRC. We can do it today, but instead the startups want to capture as much of the market as possible and rule their little world while maintaining huge datacenters.
  - rockdoe 12y ago
    Owning the users' data makes it harder for them to move to a competing service. That's not a secret.
    - zkhalique 12y ago
      That's not the only way to retain users, or to make money.
pmontra 12y ago
> It’s natural to assume that service providers like Ancestry will be good custodians of our data, No, never. Not Ancestry or anybody else. In this very moment my computer is running my daily back up my Google Drive (customers write stuff there) to my USB disk (I know, I should need a better disaster recovery solution). Not that Google doesn't provide a good service, but I don't trust them to preserve all my data until I need it, possibly tens of years in the future. I better care about it myself. I consider anything stored "on the cloud" as expendable. If I really care about it I back it up in multiple copies. I have a couple of servers where I send encrypted backups using duplicity. Is this too much for the average computer/tablet user? Yes, but there won't be a market for proper consumer backup until enough people has been burned by this kind of things and all cloud services will start offering an export procedure. Meanwhile I think it's worth using self hosted services. For my company I have a self hosted redmine with all the details of my projects.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  I think you're wrong if you're saying that "it's NOT natural to assume ...". For sure it's natural to assume a company whose sole preserve is digitisation and archive of family history -- which it has been doing for several years for millions of people -- is going to be a "good custodian". Is that the best way to proceed? Nope, abject paranoia seems like the only way to preserve data -- assuming there is a nuclear war, have you archived your data on a different continent, have you got a plan for retrieval!?!
- vgabios 12y ago
  A service's customer data must persist somewhere. "On the cloud" is a marketing abstraction to fool customers into a false sense of integrity. Just remember that most cloud services do not do backups, do not have a disaster recovery / BIA plan, do not use ECC memory in network, compute and storage systems. Users must take personal responsibility for ensuring their private data is safe, because wishing is not a winning strategy.
  - yasth 12y ago
    Amazon uses ECC [1] (search ecc) MS Azure uses ECC [2] Rackspace uses ECC [3] While compute servers aren't backed up this is by design (use storage). Storage is indeed backed up and replicated. Also most assuredly there are extensive disaster recovery plans. The cloud isn't for everyone, but FUD doesn't help. [1] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/ [2] http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/03/16/microsoft-azure-uses-error-correcting-code-memory-for-enhanced-reliability-and-security/ http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/03/16/microsoft-azure-u... [3] http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/features http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/features
ern 12y ago
OT a bit, but I am surprised that the author's family managed to keep a family-based social network going for so long. When my family tried to create one on Geni, it brought a few crazy relatives out of the woodwork, and Geni's "growth hacking" strategy of spamming anyone who was invited to join the tree led to angry real-life confrontations between inviters and invitees. Our family tree is maintained a little, but the social aspects died a quick death.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  They have some weird nuances too. We had an issue where a crazy person added a newborn child, which meant that they "owned" the record.
bitJericho 12y ago
It ought to be illegal to just shutdown and erase without giving public data like this to a historical organization.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  I'm not sure about that: the converse is closer to the truth now due to copyright law, giving people's private family correspondence and data to historical organisations without the families say so seems as wrong as wiping the data. Ancestry could have kept the data archived and offered it up for download to their users for a payment - their whole raison d'etre is supposed to be preserving family history after all. It would be interesting to know why they shutdown the service, presumably not making enough profit, whether anything replaced it?
Joeri 12y ago
I wonder how historians of the future will look back on today's time period, knowing that we had the technology to cheaply and easily document our time period for the future, and that we opted not to out of short-term financial interests. It may actually be harder for them to do things like construct family genealogies for today's people than for those living in the 1700's because with digital data stored in the cloud, preciously little of it will survive across the next few centuries. There should be a role here for government, to let people give digital data in permanent archival for historical purposes. But given how poorly governments are preserving their own digital data, I doubt it could actually work.
- iand 12y ago
  This exaggerates the problem. There is more preserved data about people than ever before, just like there was more preserved data last century than there was the previous century. There is simply vastly more data collected. I speculate that deleting 20% of this century's data would still leave an order of magnitude more data about people than was recorded last century. I think future historians will look back in the same way we do now. We're horrified that people discarded, burned or reused records from every century in history, but technology allows us to record and preserve more every year.
  - _asummers 12y ago
    Jason Scott in some talk I watched of his, made the comment that we're not the ones who get to decide what stays or goes. We simply don't have the perspective. Therefore we should just keep all of it.
  - mark-r 12y ago
    I think the problem is in assuming only 20% will be deleted. When you consider companies going out of business, technical obsolescence, etc. the figure will be closer to 99% after 50 years, that's my prediction.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Digital services could partner with printing companies to archive high-value data.
ck2 12y ago
I bet 99% of people think gmail is magically forever too and don't even backup locally.
- breakingcups 12y ago
  For those who don't: https://www.google.com/settings/takeout https://www.google.com/settings/takeout
  - sbov 12y ago
    Any idea if there's an interface to easily do this via the command line?
    - voltagex_ 12y ago
      http://gmvault.org/ http://gmvault.org/
    - gamache 12y ago
      I use mbsync to pull my Gmail messages over IMAP into a local Maildir/. Works fine, though it requires a generated app password if you have two-factor auth set up on Google.
- jpravetz 12y ago
  What archive format would you back up to, and what application would you use? I looked at this a few years ago and, if I recall, the choices weren't obvious.
  - jeromegv 12y ago
    I use cloudpull on Mac, it backups my gmail, google drive, calendar.
basseq 12y ago
Ancestry has a borderline monopoly on web-based genealogy, and unfortunately doesn't seem to be a very good steward for that data. Generally, the genealogy community is very open and sharing. Distant relatives (n cousins nth removed) will spend hours helping you out. Random people will go to local libraries or town halls to pull hard copies of vital records. LDS has one of the largest free genealogy libraries in the world. Then here comes Ancestry. $240/yr. to use their software, which puts everything you do behind a paywall. Want to share your family tree with others? They have to pay Ancestry for the privilege. There's serious value in digitized records that might well be worth the subscription fee alone. But these are public records that Ancestry has bought the exclusive rights to digitize. They're aggressively monetizing public data while shutting out competition. It's great that family history is so easy for the masses, but I'm worried the long-term future is going to be silo'd and less effective in the long run.
- suninwinter 12y ago
  You can get the subscription fee waived if you join the LDS Church. https://familysearch.org/blog/en/create-free-account-familysearch-partners/ https://familysearch.org/blog/en/create-free-account-familys...
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    How do they verify you're LDS?
    - suninwinter 12y ago
      You ask the membership clerk of your ward for your membership number, which you use to upgrade your familysearch.org account to an LDS account. Then ancestry.com uses OAuth to get access to your familysearch account.
    - gliese1337 12y ago
      They ask the Church's servers. The Church is meticulous about good record keeping (which is what makes them so good at genealogy in the first place), and every official member of the LDS church has a unique member identification number, used for things like tracking donations, ordinance records, and, of course, genealogy. Nowadays, the vast majority of these records are digitized and you can access them online through Church-owned-and-operated websites. If you happen not to be in the system yet (maybe you were baptized in the jungles of New Guinea and have only just made it back to civilization), it's pretty simple to meet up with a bishop or clerk who can verify your paper records and tell you what your membership number is, which will let you set up an account on Church websites. So, to summarize, the Church knows who its members are, and knows how to associate them with online identities. When one of them wants free access to Ancestry.com, it's basically the same process as "Sign in with Google" and such- you tell Ancestry that you're LDS, Ancestry asks the Church's servers if you're telling the truth, and the Church's authentication system teels Ancestry to let you in.
apaprocki 12y ago
I started out using Ancestry's web-only approach but once I really got going on my family history (i.e. < 1800AD) I quickly hit the limits of what the web UI was offering. Many others hit this wall as well, and that is why there is cheap desktop software, Family Tree Maker, that integrates seamlessly with the online web UI. My entire tree (~4.5gb) lives offline on my Mac, is backed up with Arq and is two-way sync'd to Ancestry's online version. Of all the providers out there that have "data lock-in", I really don't consider Ancestry one of them. If you really care about your data, keep the copy-of-record on your computer. If Ancestry's online service ever folds, your official copy will keep working perfectly. This isn't the same thing as replacing a social network service, but the actual trees do capture comments, stories, submissions, etc. from other users.
- jerf 12y ago
  How is the data stored? Can anything else read that data? Having a local copy is better than not, especially one you can back up, but in 50 years it won't help much if the format is too difficult for anything else to read. (Honest question, though. I don't have this software, so I don't know.)
  - jamroom 12y ago
    You can export to / import from GEDCOM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM which is a well know standard in the genealogy world.
    - _kst_ 12y ago
      Yes, but how much of the information actually shows up in the GEDCOM file?
      - apaprocki 12y ago
        GEDCOM is "good enough" to get out of the software for most things. I think you can export pretty much everything into some kind of readable format, but the multimedia aspects of it aren't necessarily captured by GEDCOM. You have all the pictures and things there as well, but I don't think every single link will wind up in the generated file. Maybe things have changed a little -- I just haven't had much need to export into GEDCOM.
logfromblammo 12y ago
And this is why I tell the spouse to periodically back up everything from the Ancestry.com account to local GEDCOM files. Never trust an online service with the only copy of your data.
bitwize 12y ago
Isn't Ancestry a subsidiary of MyLife.com now? What incentive have they to preserve this data, since their money is made off "Nice identity you have there, be a shame if something happened to it" spam?
- nebstrebor 12y ago
  Nope, its not.
trcollinson 12y ago
I realize the article speaks about the frustration this user had with trying to work with Ancestry.com to try to get his data back after the closure. However, has anyone gone to Ancestry and stated they will take on the liability of looking through the data and getting it into an exportable format and returning it to these users? Seems like an interesting open source project. Maybe Ancestry hasn't been given the right offer just to have the data taken off their hands. Certainly there are legal issues and privacy issues. Are these really insurmountable? If enough people really want their data, I somehow doubt that this couldn't be worked through. And I absolutely cannot imagine that Ancestry just deleted all of it when they shut down. It's probably sitting in cold storage somewhere.
mathattack 12y ago
Moreover, why not make an effort to warn users? My best guess is that Ancestry intended to export the data properly, hit a technical snag, and made the cynical decision to not follow through, in the hopes that nobody would call the company out on it. Perhaps it isn't the cynical decision, rather it's the result of nobody being left to turn on the lights, let alone handle a technical task. Once companies enter shutdown mode, there's frequently nobody left to complain to. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know the specifics here.
- mejari 12y ago
  Ancestry.com still exists as a (paid) service, they just shut down this subset of their offering, so it's definitely not "nobody left to turn on the lights".
  - mathattack 12y ago
    All the worse, then.
JoblessWonder 12y ago
I'm surprised Ancestry.com doesn't charge people for the data recovery. They would clearly pay since many paid $60 for the third party service beforehand. There is no way I can believe Ancestry.com doesn't have the technical talent to pull the raw data from the system pretty trivially. Unless it was running on some obscure in-house database backend that doesn't exist anymore and thus can't be read, I don't see why they can't put an engineer on this project for a month [and if it takes them that long...] and at least give people the raw data. Or partner with Spokt or whatever and have them charge a fee to transfer it if they want to cover their costs. People are willing to pay for this data, even if it is incomplete or difficult to digest in the delivered format. I also can't imagine they don't have a copy of the data somewhere... on some old magnetic backup tape or squirreled away in some DB admin's folders.

190 points by uptown 12y ago

danso 12y ago

tl;dr: You know how when fly-by-night growth-hacking startups suddenly shut down and do little to help their users export their data because the users never had to pay a dime to run the servers, and someone always comments, "If you're not paying, you're the product, not the customer"? This is not one of those situations. Ancestry.com charged as much as $240 annually for its service [1]. Furthermore, the MyFamily.com social network was just one small part of Ancestry.com, meaning the parent company still has the money (and I would think, the actual servers/backups) to make its paying customers whole here. What the OP describes is a seriously incompetent handling of a shutdown...and one of the variety that is most painful for customers. [1] http://corporate.ancestry.com/press/press-releases/2004/01/myfamily.com-inc.-exceeds-1.5-million-paid-subscriptions/ http://corporate.ancestry.com/press/press-releases/2004/01/m...

jqm 12y ago
My Family had years of chat history and photos on "MyFamily.com" when they shut down. This included information from members who have now passed away. I agree fully, their handling of it was insensitive and incompetent and I'll never have anything to do with any of the "Ancestry" products again. Fortunately we found Spokt.com which (after a few rocky starts) was able to "sort of" import most of the data into our new Spokt account. I feel terrible for those families who didn't and permanently lost a large chunk of their family history.
sp332 12y ago
You know how when fly-by-night growth-hacking startups suddenly shut down and do little to help their users export their data because the users never had to pay a dime to run the servers Yeah, this is a shitty thing to do to any users. Always make sure there's a way for them to export their data. After all, it isn't really yours - they just let you have it because you seemed trustworthy. Don't betray that.

ddingus 12y ago

That's pretty terrible. Well, there is a whole family who will look at hosted services with a much more jaded eye now. Who wouldn't? Truth is, this kind of garbage devalues everybody. When a large family like this loses out in such a painful way, word gets around. Clearly they are not alone either. People who tend to be into this stuff are very seriously into it. Understandable. It matters. Future offerings, however well their intent and execution might be, will have to work to overcome the painful experiences. And that is just a waste. One thing nagging at me though. Did they really just delete it? Seems that having a fall back would make great sense, if anything, for legal reasons. Or maybe it's better to have it really, really gone. Limit the potentials, so to speak? From time to time, I export various things. Just ordinary worry, but I'm reasonably informed. Who here isn't? Perhaps ordinary people really do need to advance to the next level of literacy. "The basics" today are different. In some ways, simpler. In other ways, potentially more complex. Just saw danso comment. Yeah, my thoughts too. It was possible to treat people right. Do they really just not care? If this were me, I would have a very hard time sleeping at night, particularly given some options. It was easy enough to set up and make the money...

EGreg 12y ago
Word should get around. Centralized services suck. I long for the days when people cared that the internet was decentralized, and some of the best apps were too. Email, the Web, even IRC. We can do it today, but instead the startups want to capture as much of the market as possible and rule their little world while maintaining huge datacenters.
- rockdoe 12y ago
  Owning the users' data makes it harder for them to move to a competing service. That's not a secret.
  - zkhalique 12y ago
    That's not the only way to retain users, or to make money.

pmontra 12y ago

> It’s natural to assume that service providers like Ancestry will be good custodians of our data, No, never. Not Ancestry or anybody else. In this very moment my computer is running my daily back up my Google Drive (customers write stuff there) to my USB disk (I know, I should need a better disaster recovery solution). Not that Google doesn't provide a good service, but I don't trust them to preserve all my data until I need it, possibly tens of years in the future. I better care about it myself. I consider anything stored "on the cloud" as expendable. If I really care about it I back it up in multiple copies. I have a couple of servers where I send encrypted backups using duplicity. Is this too much for the average computer/tablet user? Yes, but there won't be a market for proper consumer backup until enough people has been burned by this kind of things and all cloud services will start offering an export procedure. Meanwhile I think it's worth using self hosted services. For my company I have a self hosted redmine with all the details of my projects.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
I think you're wrong if you're saying that "it's NOT natural to assume ...". For sure it's natural to assume a company whose sole preserve is digitisation and archive of family history -- which it has been doing for several years for millions of people -- is going to be a "good custodian". Is that the best way to proceed? Nope, abject paranoia seems like the only way to preserve data -- assuming there is a nuclear war, have you archived your data on a different continent, have you got a plan for retrieval!?!
vgabios 12y ago
A service's customer data must persist somewhere. "On the cloud" is a marketing abstraction to fool customers into a false sense of integrity. Just remember that most cloud services do not do backups, do not have a disaster recovery / BIA plan, do not use ECC memory in network, compute and storage systems. Users must take personal responsibility for ensuring their private data is safe, because wishing is not a winning strategy.
- yasth 12y ago
  Amazon uses ECC [1] (search ecc) MS Azure uses ECC [2] Rackspace uses ECC [3] While compute servers aren't backed up this is by design (use storage). Storage is indeed backed up and replicated. Also most assuredly there are extensive disaster recovery plans. The cloud isn't for everyone, but FUD doesn't help. [1] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/ [2] http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/03/16/microsoft-azure-uses-error-correcting-code-memory-for-enhanced-reliability-and-security/ http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/03/16/microsoft-azure-u... [3] http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/features http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/features

ern 12y ago

OT a bit, but I am surprised that the author's family managed to keep a family-based social network going for so long. When my family tried to create one on Geni, it brought a few crazy relatives out of the woodwork, and Geni's "growth hacking" strategy of spamming anyone who was invited to join the tree led to angry real-life confrontations between inviters and invitees. Our family tree is maintained a little, but the social aspects died a quick death.

Spooky23 12y ago
They have some weird nuances too. We had an issue where a crazy person added a newborn child, which meant that they "owned" the record.

bitJericho 12y ago

It ought to be illegal to just shutdown and erase without giving public data like this to a historical organization.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
I'm not sure about that: the converse is closer to the truth now due to copyright law, giving people's private family correspondence and data to historical organisations without the families say so seems as wrong as wiping the data. Ancestry could have kept the data archived and offered it up for download to their users for a payment - their whole raison d'etre is supposed to be preserving family history after all. It would be interesting to know why they shutdown the service, presumably not making enough profit, whether anything replaced it?

Joeri 12y ago

I wonder how historians of the future will look back on today's time period, knowing that we had the technology to cheaply and easily document our time period for the future, and that we opted not to out of short-term financial interests. It may actually be harder for them to do things like construct family genealogies for today's people than for those living in the 1700's because with digital data stored in the cloud, preciously little of it will survive across the next few centuries. There should be a role here for government, to let people give digital data in permanent archival for historical purposes. But given how poorly governments are preserving their own digital data, I doubt it could actually work.

iand 12y ago
This exaggerates the problem. There is more preserved data about people than ever before, just like there was more preserved data last century than there was the previous century. There is simply vastly more data collected. I speculate that deleting 20% of this century's data would still leave an order of magnitude more data about people than was recorded last century. I think future historians will look back in the same way we do now. We're horrified that people discarded, burned or reused records from every century in history, but technology allows us to record and preserve more every year.
- _asummers 12y ago
  Jason Scott in some talk I watched of his, made the comment that we're not the ones who get to decide what stays or goes. We simply don't have the perspective. Therefore we should just keep all of it.
- mark-r 12y ago
  I think the problem is in assuming only 20% will be deleted. When you consider companies going out of business, technical obsolescence, etc. the figure will be closer to 99% after 50 years, that's my prediction.
walterbell 12y ago
Digital services could partner with printing companies to archive high-value data.

ck2 12y ago

I bet 99% of people think gmail is magically forever too and don't even backup locally.

breakingcups 12y ago
For those who don't: https://www.google.com/settings/takeout https://www.google.com/settings/takeout
- sbov 12y ago
  Any idea if there's an interface to easily do this via the command line?
  - voltagex_ 12y ago
    http://gmvault.org/ http://gmvault.org/
  - gamache 12y ago
    I use mbsync to pull my Gmail messages over IMAP into a local Maildir/. Works fine, though it requires a generated app password if you have two-factor auth set up on Google.
jpravetz 12y ago
What archive format would you back up to, and what application would you use? I looked at this a few years ago and, if I recall, the choices weren't obvious.
- jeromegv 12y ago
  I use cloudpull on Mac, it backups my gmail, google drive, calendar.

basseq 12y ago

Ancestry has a borderline monopoly on web-based genealogy, and unfortunately doesn't seem to be a very good steward for that data. Generally, the genealogy community is very open and sharing. Distant relatives (n cousins nth removed) will spend hours helping you out. Random people will go to local libraries or town halls to pull hard copies of vital records. LDS has one of the largest free genealogy libraries in the world. Then here comes Ancestry. $240/yr. to use their software, which puts everything you do behind a paywall. Want to share your family tree with others? They have to pay Ancestry for the privilege. There's serious value in digitized records that might well be worth the subscription fee alone. But these are public records that Ancestry has bought the exclusive rights to digitize. They're aggressively monetizing public data while shutting out competition. It's great that family history is so easy for the masses, but I'm worried the long-term future is going to be silo'd and less effective in the long run.

suninwinter 12y ago
You can get the subscription fee waived if you join the LDS Church. https://familysearch.org/blog/en/create-free-account-familysearch-partners/ https://familysearch.org/blog/en/create-free-account-familys...
- Someone1234 12y ago
  How do they verify you're LDS?
  - suninwinter 12y ago
    You ask the membership clerk of your ward for your membership number, which you use to upgrade your familysearch.org account to an LDS account. Then ancestry.com uses OAuth to get access to your familysearch account.
  - gliese1337 12y ago
    They ask the Church's servers. The Church is meticulous about good record keeping (which is what makes them so good at genealogy in the first place), and every official member of the LDS church has a unique member identification number, used for things like tracking donations, ordinance records, and, of course, genealogy. Nowadays, the vast majority of these records are digitized and you can access them online through Church-owned-and-operated websites. If you happen not to be in the system yet (maybe you were baptized in the jungles of New Guinea and have only just made it back to civilization), it's pretty simple to meet up with a bishop or clerk who can verify your paper records and tell you what your membership number is, which will let you set up an account on Church websites. So, to summarize, the Church knows who its members are, and knows how to associate them with online identities. When one of them wants free access to Ancestry.com, it's basically the same process as "Sign in with Google" and such- you tell Ancestry that you're LDS, Ancestry asks the Church's servers if you're telling the truth, and the Church's authentication system teels Ancestry to let you in.

apaprocki 12y ago

I started out using Ancestry's web-only approach but once I really got going on my family history (i.e. < 1800AD) I quickly hit the limits of what the web UI was offering. Many others hit this wall as well, and that is why there is cheap desktop software, Family Tree Maker, that integrates seamlessly with the online web UI. My entire tree (~4.5gb) lives offline on my Mac, is backed up with Arq and is two-way sync'd to Ancestry's online version. Of all the providers out there that have "data lock-in", I really don't consider Ancestry one of them. If you really care about your data, keep the copy-of-record on your computer. If Ancestry's online service ever folds, your official copy will keep working perfectly. This isn't the same thing as replacing a social network service, but the actual trees do capture comments, stories, submissions, etc. from other users.

jerf 12y ago
How is the data stored? Can anything else read that data? Having a local copy is better than not, especially one you can back up, but in 50 years it won't help much if the format is too difficult for anything else to read. (Honest question, though. I don't have this software, so I don't know.)
- jamroom 12y ago
  You can export to / import from GEDCOM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM which is a well know standard in the genealogy world.
  - _kst_ 12y ago
    Yes, but how much of the information actually shows up in the GEDCOM file?
    - apaprocki 12y ago
      GEDCOM is "good enough" to get out of the software for most things. I think you can export pretty much everything into some kind of readable format, but the multimedia aspects of it aren't necessarily captured by GEDCOM. You have all the pictures and things there as well, but I don't think every single link will wind up in the generated file. Maybe things have changed a little -- I just haven't had much need to export into GEDCOM.

logfromblammo 12y ago

And this is why I tell the spouse to periodically back up everything from the Ancestry.com account to local GEDCOM files. Never trust an online service with the only copy of your data.

bitwize 12y ago

Isn't Ancestry a subsidiary of MyLife.com now? What incentive have they to preserve this data, since their money is made off "Nice identity you have there, be a shame if something happened to it" spam?

nebstrebor 12y ago
Nope, its not.

trcollinson 12y ago

I realize the article speaks about the frustration this user had with trying to work with Ancestry.com to try to get his data back after the closure. However, has anyone gone to Ancestry and stated they will take on the liability of looking through the data and getting it into an exportable format and returning it to these users? Seems like an interesting open source project. Maybe Ancestry hasn't been given the right offer just to have the data taken off their hands. Certainly there are legal issues and privacy issues. Are these really insurmountable? If enough people really want their data, I somehow doubt that this couldn't be worked through. And I absolutely cannot imagine that Ancestry just deleted all of it when they shut down. It's probably sitting in cold storage somewhere.

mathattack 12y ago

Moreover, why not make an effort to warn users? My best guess is that Ancestry intended to export the data properly, hit a technical snag, and made the cynical decision to not follow through, in the hopes that nobody would call the company out on it. Perhaps it isn't the cynical decision, rather it's the result of nobody being left to turn on the lights, let alone handle a technical task. Once companies enter shutdown mode, there's frequently nobody left to complain to. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know the specifics here.

mejari 12y ago
Ancestry.com still exists as a (paid) service, they just shut down this subset of their offering, so it's definitely not "nobody left to turn on the lights".
- mathattack 12y ago
  All the worse, then.

JoblessWonder 12y ago

I'm surprised Ancestry.com doesn't charge people for the data recovery. They would clearly pay since many paid $60 for the third party service beforehand. There is no way I can believe Ancestry.com doesn't have the technical talent to pull the raw data from the system pretty trivially. Unless it was running on some obscure in-house database backend that doesn't exist anymore and thus can't be read, I don't see why they can't put an engineer on this project for a month [and if it takes them that long...] and at least give people the raw data. Or partner with Spokt or whatever and have them charge a fee to transfer it if they want to cover their costs. People are willing to pay for this data, even if it is incomplete or difficult to digest in the delivered format. I also can't imagine they don't have a copy of the data somewhere... on some old magnetic backup tape or squirreled away in some DB admin's folders.