Ancestry.com Membership

Things have been slow moving in my genealogy lately. My husband was gracious enough to let me purchase a one year Ancestry.com membership, which is really cool. I've found a lot for his family, but nothing for mine. =P

I've found quite a bit of stuff for my family on FamilySearch, and would have expected at least confirmation of the same information on Ancestry.com, but found nothing at all. I would love to see the day when Ancestry.com starts offering more records from non-anglo countries. Mexico has kept very good birth, death, and marriage records since 1859, and there has been much genealogical work done on the founding families of Mexico beginning in the 1500s.

I like the Ancestry.com "family site" for the most part. It's cool being able to link records straight into it, although some records that I've found have not had an "add to someone" button. This mostly happens with things like phone book records.

The downside is that there are no reporting features. Of course, the easy way to overcome this is to download the Gedcom and open it in Gramps, my normal genealogy program. Or so I thought. When I opened it, I found that everyone and every event was there, but there were no relationships between anyone. Defeats the purpose of the thing, doesn't it?

It turns out that the Gedcoms generated by Ancestry.com lack a tag that ties people to families, as per the Gedcom standards. Another Gramps user has already contacted Ancestry.com and was told essentially that they have no intention of fixing it. This is the genealogy equivalent of DRM (Digital Rights Management, the stuff that makes you not able to burn your mp3s to cds and makes your video fuzzy). "We will not follow the standards that the whole industry uses so that your data is portable, so your data which you've worked hard to find, source, and compile will be worthless outside of our website (and maybe the programs that we tell you to buy)." Lovely, huh?

The exact response states:

Dear ______,

We appreciate your message.
We are sorry for the trouble with the file. The GEDCOM file is read differently by the different programs. You may need to edit the file after it is entered into the new software.

If there is anything else with which we might assist you, please let us know. 1-800-262-3787

Jennifer
Member Solutions
Ancestry.com

Translation: The file is fine, all you have to do is add parents and children and spouses to every single person (all 1,000+ of them) after you import it! Nothing wrong at all!

I'll be emailing them soon, when I have the energy to address them in a way worthy of their already-stated non-compliance.

I haven't gotten down to the Family History Center yet, too busy with school and such. I will certainly post when I do though. =)