I've written a couple of reviews of Ancestry.com over the past five years and have some insights to share. A few users have already hit some important issues and have tips for saving money. My views are more along the lines of some of Ancestry.com's fundamental failings. For instance, I wrote earlier this year that:

... Ancestry.com and other online databases such as Rootsweb have been of limited use. The "zillions of irrelevant hits" problem is only part of the story. Other problems include an emphasis on censuses and other lists (ship registers, military rosters, etc.) as opposed to photographs, local histories, and trend data relating to health/immigration/economy. The databases also fail to provide mechanisms to connect or correlate names, despite statistical and algorithm-driven methods to piece together likely connections. Sometimes, family trees submitted by other people help connect the dots, but often the trees are poorly documented or contain significant errors.

Another issue I have concerns the way Ancestry.com is marketed. It encourages people to depend on an imperfect database, to the detriment of great sources of data are right in their homes or a phone call away. People would get much more personal value and good data by spending an hour on the phone with their oldest relative or sorting through old letters and photos, than by spending ten hours on Ancestry.com.

That's not to say Ancestry.com is a poor tool. It can help fill in some gaps and surface some useful documents. But it's not a magical family tree machine that the marketing and slick user interface suggest.

See also:

• Ancestry.com review

• Ancestry.com followup: Using outsourced Chinese labor to overcome OCR limits