
Deleting the Family Tree – Ancestry.com erased 10 years of correspondence - uptown
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/04/myfamily_shuttered_ancestry_com_deleted_10_years_of_my_family_history.html
======
danso
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/m...](http://corporate.ancestry.com/press/press-
releases/2004/01/myfamily.com-inc.-exceeds-1.5-million-paid-subscriptions/)

~~~
jqm
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.

------
basseq
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
You can get the subscription fee waived if you join the LDS Church.

[https://familysearch.org/blog/en/create-free-account-
familys...](https://familysearch.org/blog/en/create-free-account-familysearch-
partners/)

~~~
Someone1234
How do they verify you're LDS?

~~~
gliese1337
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.

------
pmontra
> 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.

~~~
acdha
> > It’s natural to assume that service providers like Ancestry will be good
> custodians of our data,

> No, never. Not Ancestry or anybody else

I respectfully disagree: it _is_ natural for people to assume that companies
won't callously discard their customers’ data. If it wasn't natural, we
wouldn't need to have so much effort going towards education about the terms
of service to watch out for and how to make your own copies. Too many people
have a mental model for corporations which grossly exaggerates the level of
stability and long-term planning.

~~~
pmontra
Ok, you have a point. Trust is natural (think about the attitude of little
children) and education goes like "don't trust strangers". Hoping for the best
often is a sub optimal strategy. I was starting from that assumption.

~~~
erroneousfunk
Trust isn't for "little children." Trust is what makes the world go round. I
trust that my bank won't close overnight and steal all my money. I trust that
the food I buy is safe for human consumption. I trust that random people on
the street won't attack me because they feel like it.

"Hoping for the best" (or perhaps "trusting that people won't screw me over")
is actually an _extremely_ good strategy -- far better than not trusting
anyone with anything. I can hire third parties to cook my food, do my taxes,
handle my banking, even babysit my children after a background check (where I
have to trust the background checking company) and a brief interview. If I
couldn't trust people, I simply wouldn't be able to function in the modern
world.

So I have a company, who I have paid to store my data. The company has been
good so far, I use their services frequently, and I have every reason to trust
them (they've had my credit card info, and my family's for years, haven't
screwed me over, haven't lost any other data in all this time...) The company
is shutting down, and they explicitly tell me that they will let me download
all of my data, including text conversations. I download the data, only to
open it weeks later and find that the company has failed to do what they said
they would. In this one particular case, the strategy of "trust" has failed.
However, in the long run, it's made my life a heck of a lot better.

~~~
pmontra
Reputation.

We pick banks, stores and neighborhoods based on reputation. We trust some of
them because they proved to be good and we don't trust others (I bet there are
areas of the world and maybe of your city where you won't walk alone in the
night.)

We get educated to trust according to reputation.

Personally I don't trust much Internet services because so many of them die
young. I always wonder how many years any of the services I have to use for
work will stay with me and how I can move my data somewhere else, in the few
cases it makes sense (example: you can export Trello's data, but then what?)
My customers and I use them because they are so convenient but I'm sure that
sooner or later one of them will die in the middle of a project and we will be
burnt. I have redmine wikis from 8 years ago. I'll have Trello's boards for
the projects I'm working on now in 2022?

But I also don't trust much any "normal" company. I expect that they make
their interests first, mine maybe. I buy from them but caveat emptor.

------
Joeri
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
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.

~~~
mark-r
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.

------
ddingus
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
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
Owning the users' data makes it harder for them to move to a competing
service. That's not a secret.

~~~
zkhalique
That's not the only way to retain users, or to make money.

~~~
_asummers
But it's a cheap and lazy way, so it's ubiquitous unfortunately.

------
apaprocki
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.

~~~
Raphmedia
> (i.e. < 1800AD)

Now this is impressive. How did you get back that far? I've trouble finding
out who my great-great-grandparents were.

~~~
apaprocki
Basically anyone who ever set foot in the U.S. is 99.9% guaranteed to be found
electronically now. That will take you to where they came from and in most
cases that original generation will be known. Since people did not travel much
(as we know it today), chances are they are mostly from that place , wherever
it is, for some time back. Thanks to Napoleon (you don't thank him much, do
you?), standard records have been kept across at least Europe back to their
inception in ~1810. Prior to that, records devolve into individual church
parishes and are mostly in Latin. It is super easy to pick up the Napoleonic
civil record format in any language. I never could quite grasp the hand-
written ink-well pen Latin records of the late 1700s so I don't know how much
further back I will be able to go.

I do have to give a special shout-out to the Polish national archives as well
as the U.S. National Archives people in Maryland. I was able to deal with the
Poles entirely online and request hundreds of records which they reproduced
for a reasonable fee in a short time. The U.S. archives also went out of their
way to help me. Hell, even the FBI FOIA process worked well and gave me a
valuable dossier. The one awesome lead that let me down was the NYPD FOIL
request I made. A relative many generations back ran with Al Capone when he
was in Brooklyn and was gunned down. The NYPD never caught the killer and
supposedly had a hat left at the scene and other evidence. Murder
investigations are kept indefinitely so they _should_ still have it in some
warehouse somewhere, but they couldn't find it after searching for it
manually. (Digitize all the things, people!)

------
ern
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
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.

------
ck2
I bet 99% of people think gmail is magically forever too and don't even backup
locally.

~~~
breakingcups
For those who don't:
[https://www.google.com/settings/takeout](https://www.google.com/settings/takeout)

~~~
sbov
Any idea if there's an interface to easily do this via the command line?

~~~
voltagex_
[http://gmvault.org/](http://gmvault.org/)

------
logfromblammo
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.

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

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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?

------
mathattack
_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
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
All the worse, then.

------
JoblessWonder
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.

------
trcollinson
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.

------
bitwize
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
Nope, its not.

