Don’t be alarmed, but I’m about to alarm you. A little. Well, I’m going to make you think a bit, anyway. Nothing will happen tomorrow, but it sounds like Ancestry’s parent company, Permira Advisers LLP, is willing to take out a very risky loan in order to fund a move that would denude Ancestry of $900 million. Yikes. I learned this from an article in Bloomberg, which you can read for yourself and assess: Ancestry.com Owners Aim to Extract $900 Million Payout With Loan. I was fueled by concern and milk chocolate today, so I recorded this one without a script or a net! If I made errors in my ill-educated understandings or assumptions about markets, economics, finance or financial risk, feel free to contact me and I’ll include POLITE comments in the next episode (don’t be a Jeffrey, mmkay?). In this episode, I’ll discuss what I think they’re thinking, and what we should be considering and doing as genealogists, family historians and researchers to keep our work safe day to day.
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For me, I will remain with Ancestry until
I die, it folds or I can no longer afford a subscription. It has the largest amount of records on subscription offer of any service. I can’t accurately climb my tree without Ancestry and FamilySearch (FS). FS has the second largest data collection I believe. I will keep my Ancestry tree synced up with Family Tree Maker 2017 on my desktop. I will rev up my practice of downloading every single source document image I find to my home computer (a laptop) either by direct download or via Family Tree Maker’s wonderful Ancestry syncing abilities. . I will backup my files to separate files and to my Cloud backup services. I will also transfer my family files by program import into RootsMagic and probably Legacy too as further insurance in case one of these desktop program makers close down. Plus I will keep those transferred files backed up in multiple places. Each of my three desktop programs offer features lacking in the other programs. Particularly handy are their differing family file error checking routines. Each will find errors in my files the others miss. Each has different useful reporting, charting and geographical boundary line or place name checking features. Because each has adequate importing routines to accept each other’s databases it isn’t all that onerous to import one to another. Only FamilyTree Maker and RootsMagic sync with Ancestry. FamilyTree Maker’s ability and intuitiveness exceeds RootsMagic in my mind. Right now I believe only Family Tree Maker is a 64bit offering. It’s my favorite of the three for ease of use as well.
For many reasons I will never use Gedcoms as back up for my genealogy files nor would I use Family Search’s one world tree as my storage plan. In brief though – every software program, online service and genealogy software program’s gedcom creation and transfer system is slightly different. Gedcom has no actual standard standard. All require cleanup of transfer errors, omissions and truncation. Plus Gedcom being a text transfer medium means my media source images are not transferred. Holy Cow! Links are created to media databases that must also be transferred to the new service separately but contiguously.
FS’s world tree is a coop wiki type tree which is notoriously inaccurate and hasn’t gotten any better as to my family over the last several years. I’m tired of well meaning but less detailed and more gullible genealogists (than even myself) changing my well sourced well explained inputs and corrections without consulting me first. Or not returning my queries as to their unsourced additions.
As to Ancestry’s borrowing- it is a worrisome situation. They’ve been running up debt for years apparently. Just like people, corporations sometimes run debt up to the hilt before filing bankruptcy. Companies also do it to forestall unwanted takeovers. Makes them less attractive and not a cash cow. Companies can also do it before a sell out but it makes them less attractive. Theoretically they could cash out stockholders ahead of a some other disaster they know is coming but lenders can’t see. But what would that be? A pending class action lawsuit of some kind? They are making huge amount of revenue. As to the person quoted in Bloomberg who says Ancestry’s dna test and subscription sales are down – I have to doubt this. If so – why do I still have dozens of new dna matches every single month? How did Ancestry’s dna test base increase from 2 million test takers to 15 million in just the last few years?
Just my thoughts. I am certainly no financial whiz kid but do have an MBA!
Awesome analysis on all fronts. As for the various programs and platforms, I agree – they have to be used in an intelligent network to get the most out of them. I vouch for FS only inasmuch as people have to be able to merge duplicates and use common sense. It’s VERY frustrating, I admit. I have a calling to clean up messes on FamilySearch, and a fair portion of my listeners are LDS too. I feel like it’s my job to encourage people to do the work correctly so that FS is improved daily.
I appreciate the MBA analysis, too. As the only non-MBA in the family, I need this information! Can I quote you, with your name, on the podcast? I would love to make this available to listeners!
Sure Carolynn. You may do what you wish with my analysis. It’s just my take after all. Might be nice to get a discussion going and learn from others with different takes and strategies. I’m glad you feel a mission to correct FS! I love all you LDS folks do for genealogists around the world. I delighted in my first visit to the Family Search Library after RootsTech 2018 for all the help they have, all the sources available and absolutely nothing but sweet people with no proselytizing. But I get so frustrated with the one world tree concept. I wish one could build their tree privately and be able to opt in to World Tree Sharing whereby additions to my private tree could be uploaded into the World Tree with no backward syncing to my private tree. That way world tree users might be able to see all the options/opinions for my 3grt grandparents including my own. I’m not a programmer but it seems to me this could work out like Ancestry’s new ThruLines look. Let me know please when you may quote me so I can be sure not to miss it. Thanks Carolynn! Simona
I think this whole thing might be worth an interview, you and me, and you explaining how you do your work. I think listeners would get a boost out of it. What do you think?
Carolynn