Barking Up the Wrong Tree: AncestryDNA News

10 November 2014

AncestryDNA News

If you missed last week's AncestryDNA news you can read about it here.
A few things from Anna's blog post stuck out to me.

"These advancements will make AncestryDNA matching far more accurate, and each new match will be more likely to lead to a new discovery."

What good are "far more accurate" matches when we have no way of seeing how they match or each other? How about some decent tools? A matches in common tool? A surname search that actually works? Anything?

"Best of all, we’re going to roll this out to all AncestryDNA members for free, and you don’t have to take a new test to get the benefits."

Is it just me or does anyone else think Anna is trying to make Ancestry.com sound magnanimous? In reality that's exactly what Ancestry promised from the start. No charge for new matches, updates to our results, or new features. If they started charging for new features sales would drop dramatically. Why would anyone buy a test if there was a possibility of, a year or two down the road, Ancestry actually coming up with decent tools that we could only use if we shell out more money?

"Pairing this data with well-documented family trees and the expertise of Ancestry has allowed the AncestryDNA science team to develop groundbreaking new algorithms for finding and predicting relationships through DNA. These new algorithms will lead to better matches for anyone who tests with AncestryDNA."

Am I reading this correctly? AncestryDNA matches will factor in trees? What the...? Yeah, because that has worked so well for Ancestry's shaky leaf hints.
Is Ancestry hiring hundreds of genealogists to vet those "well-documented" family trees? Or will the "well-documented" label be based solely on the number of records attached? We all know how helpful that will be. Our clickophile cousins can just mash our trees together with theirs with no regard for accuracy and Ancestry will assure them that the relationship is solid. UGH!

"Be confident that your matches are in good hands with our team of experts."

Confident? Ha! Experts? If their DNA experts are as qualified as their social media experts the AncestryDNA test will become worthless. We'll have to wait and see what updates they have in store for us.

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Blog Reviews

Barking has been "deemed offensive to [Ancestry.com's] brand" and is banned from their Facebook pages. In Ancestry's "Community" comments with links to Barking are censored.
Dear Emma, Hannah, Jemima, Mary Jane, and all of her other personalities agree that I use "the banner of 'education' to actually mock, deride and laugh at [Ancestry's] own customers" and I "can make [my] point concerning tree inaccuracies & cock-ups and their effect on our 'hints' system without being downright unpleasant and sarcastic about it."
Allen says, “your cute little blog is a waste of bandwidth at best”
Ann thinks I'm "...copying and pasting mistakes on trees and calling it a blog" and that my readers are "mean-spirited people...who like to have a laugh at the expense of others."
Sue was really offended by the “...continual stream of sarcasm and constant poking fun...What a nasty taste in my mouth your blog left me with. Unpleasant, sarcastic and jeering at people who you obviously see as your intellectual inferiors. Won't be reading that again.”
And finally from Les, "You truly are a horrible woman, pointing out mistakes is one thing but blatantly laughing and taking the p is completely out of order."

Why?

Researching our family histories we are bound to make mistakes. Hopefully we are quick to correct them. Unfortunately some people refuse to read or think before adding information to their family trees. Some trees have been abandoned so the errors are there for eternity. Here we will laugh, mock and shake our heads at the carelessness, stupidity and/or ignorance of those errors.
All examples are taken from trees published online.
I'll also post tips occasionally, though the messed up trees are a great example of what NOT to do.
If you have an online tree to suggest for a future post please send me a link: buwtree(at)gmail(dot)com

The Fine Print

1. Copyright: Barking Up the Wrong Tree is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License and is owned and administered by Loretta Gillespie.

2. Content: Barking Up the Wrong Tree is responsible for the content of this site, not including visitor comments. Barking Up the Wrong Tree reflects the personal views and opinions of Loretta Gillespie.

3. Credit: Credit is not given to tree owners to protect the clueless. A tree owner who discovers their tree on this site should correct their mistakes so no one else realizes they were once a clickophile.

4. Accuracy and Validity: While there are helpful pointers on Barking Up the Wrong Tree a majority of posts are intended to be humorous. The disastrous trees are copied exactly as they appear on Ancestry.com. These trees are being used to show others what NOT to do.

5. Images: Attempts are made to source images used despite the fact that the trees they are taken from do not include source information.

6. Comments: Barking Up the Wrong Tree will exercise its right to delete comments which are deemed to be spam, offensive, childish or just plain stupid.

7. Liability: The content at Barking Up the Wrong Tree is not to be taken as fact nor absolute. Barking Up the Wrong Tree contains posts that are humorous and posts that are research tips. Barking Up the Wrong Tree is not responsible for anyone who cannot tell the difference between the two. The sites that Barking Up the Wrong Tree links to via hyperlinks are not under its control. Those sites are responsible for the content of those sites. If you do not find the humor on Barking Up the Wrong Tree to your taste then stop reading. If you choose instead to send an email to the owner it may be published on Barking Up the Wrong Tree and mocked publicly.

Thanks to Thomas MacEntee for allowing the use of the GeneaBloggers terms as a template.