Are Ancestry's New Features Worth It?

Ancestry.com has introduced Ancestry Pro Tools, a new suite of tools designed to enhance the functionality of family trees on their platform. The video provides an in-depth look at these tools, which include a fact checker that identifies potential errors in a profile, such as a residence event occurring after a person's death date. The fact checker is not limited to posthumous dates and can also highlight implausible scenarios like a child being born before their mother was eight years old. The Pro Tools also offer new ways to filter and sort through the list of individuals in a family tree, allowing users to focus on specific family lines, end-of-line ancestors, or individuals with events in certain locations. This feature is particularly useful for research in regions with patronymic naming conventions. Additionally, Pro Tools includes the ability to filter for possible errors and duplicates within the family tree. The video also introduces Charts and Reports, which provide various types of reports, including Descendancy and Register Reports, as well as an On and Tafel report for ancestors and a Family Group Sheet. However, the presenter suggests that Ancestry should add the name of the report creator, the tree source, the creation date, and the option to include source citations to these reports.

As of the time of the video, Ancestry Pro Tools is available exclusively to Ancestry customers in the U.S. with specific subscription types, including a U.S. subscription, a world subscription, an all-access subscription, or an LDS account. It is not accessible to those with a free Ancestry guest account. The Pro Tools features come at an additional subscription cost of $9.99 per month on top of the existing Ancestry subscription fees. The presenter, a professional genealogist with experience at Ancestry, expresses disappointment that the error checker, a fundamental tool for ensuring the accuracy of family trees, is placed behind a paywall. They argue that while there are costs to developing new features, the error checker should be made available to all users to improve the overall quality and accuracy of family trees on the platform, which benefits not just individual users but the entire Ancestry community by enhancing hints, suggested records, and DNA throughlines.

The presenter emphasizes the importance of accurate family trees on Ancestry, which currently has nearly 1.9 billion entries in public family trees, with many more in private trees. They argue that making the error checker available to all users would greatly improve the accuracy of these trees, thereby enhancing the quality of hints, suggested records, and DNA throughlines for the entire user base. The presenter calls on Ancestry to make the error checking functionality available to everyone, regardless of their location or subscription status, to foster a more accurate and beneficial genealogy research experience. They invite viewers to share their thoughts on Ancestry's Pro Tools, its functionality, and its cost in the comments section and encourage developing good research habits for more effective family tree discoveries.