Monday, September 29, 2014

What's Actually Wrong with Ancestry.com: Hundreds of Incorrect Hints

Really, ACOM? Is Laudel, Vest-Agder, Norway
really in Denmark?
Excuse me while I rant for a moment about how once again ACOM's nonsensical system makes for inefficient genealogy work.

I just got literally hundreds of hints for my Norwegian branch and so far not a single one is accurate. The hints system seems to go off of name and dates only, not locations. I get that people move around and shouldn't be defined by one location... but when I have a birth/baptism location for someone in my tree, why is it giving me hints for births/baptisms in a completely different county or sometimes even nation?! The system doesn't understand how repetitive Scandinavian names are, because they used patronymic names, there will be thousands of Lars Gundersens, for example, and dozens of them born in or around 1833. That doesn't mean someone who was clearly born in Norway matches a birth/baptism record from Denmark! Why are locations not included in the criteria for hints?

It would be fair enough if I was getting a Denmark hint for a marriage when the individual was born in Norway - it's not impossible an individual moved from Norway to Denmark in between their birth and marriage. It also wouldn't be unreasonable if I had no location entered for a birth. But I'm talking about Denmark birth/baptism records popping up for people who have a birth/baptism location as Norway. Likewise, a lot of Norway records are popping up too but they are all in the wrong county!

If it were just a handful of hints, it would not be a big deal. But I now have to go through literally hundreds of hints and make sure they are truly bogus before I delete them. If I could just hit "ignore" it might not be so bad but on half the Norway hints, the location isn't listed until you view the record, which means I can't just look at the hint overview and click ignore, I have to open up the record, compare the locations, then hit ignore.

Thanks for making a whole bunch of tedious busy work for me, ACOM!

2 comments:

  1. What irks me is when I put in a date of birth, 1780, and it gives me people who were born in 1860. As well as both men and women.

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, or when you have a death date of 1810 and they give you hints for 1850+ census records. It's easy enough to click ignore when it's just the occasional hint but this onslaught of hundreds at a time was just so tedious.

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