Christa Cowan, who works for Ancestry.com, announced the rollout of Ancestry.com ProTools in a Facebook post yesterday. I was intrigued and wanted to know more about them. I Googled to see what I could find, but information was scarce. There were a few YouTube videos, but most of the time, videos are not convenient for me, and I was hoping for written information. I'd been working on my tree yesterday, but hadn't seen anything about these new tools. I'd have very much liked to see a banner on my home page, like they do for DNA sales, announcing this new subscription option and providing detailed information on what this subscription model includes.
I searched online but didn't find any great information on how to access these tools or details about them. I eventually clicked on my account and went to my account settings. Here I was finally presented with an option to sign up for ProTools (and more information, albeit limited, on what was included). The tools are Charts & Reports, Tree Checker, Maps and Advanced Filters. At $9.99 per month (billed monthly), on top of what we already pay, the price seemed a little steep, but I decided to go for it anyway (I mean, I can always cancel right?) As soon as I subscribed, the options immediately displayed in both the drop down menu on the home page under trees, and also when viewing my tree. I wish they'd made this new feature a little more intuitive to find. Maybe it was just because it's new and my account hadn't updated with the new options yet. I'll give the benefit of the doubt. I did notice today the Ancestry.com help pages now have some information about the features.
Charts and Reports does present me with the elusive 7 generation fan chart some users had during beta testing (but I was never able to see). I most definitely like this feature! And it is viewable as not only names/dates, but also hints or photos so you can see easily see where you may want to do more research. This is the 2nd most helpful ProTool for my research (see below for the ProTool I think will be most helpful for me).
The Reports are nothing special in my opinion. If you use only Ancestry.com, you might find them helpful, but they're not much different from the reports desktop software, like FTM, has provided for years. They will be of limited use to me at this point. They include Descendancy, Ahnentafel, Register and Family Group Sheet.
The Maps have some really nice filtering options, and they may be fun to play around with, but they're certainly not essential to my research. I guess it really depends on what you want to learn about your family and/or what brick walls you may be trying to break down. I'm more concerned with people themselves at this stage of my research. With the filtering options available, they may very well be useful to some, just not so much for me.
The Tree Checker (with filters for possible errors selected) primarily found unknown children for my tree. Unknown children seem to be an issue for the algorithm. I'm constantly ignoring hints because they belong to someone else already in my tree. Plus, it also picked up all the people it was suggesting I might want to merge the unknown children with. I dutifully went through and told the algorithm they were not matches, and I cleared those up in short order. I was hopeful it would also tell the algorithm to stop suggesting useless hints for those incorrect matches, but it did not (...sigh...).
It also accurately identified 2 duplicates (out of 2146 people) and found 3 facts more than 10 years after date of death. Those were typos on my part, and I'm happy they were called out so I could correct them. It's interesting, because I routinely attach facts to parents long dead when they're mentioned in the obituary of their children. These facts are often far longer than 10 years after the parent's death, but Ancestry did not flag any of these as a problem (thankfully!) I have a sneaking suspicion it's because I create custom facts for obituaries. I have to wonder if the algorithm could possibly be ignoring custom facts...I'll have to keep a closer eye to see if that might be the case.
Compared to the MyHeritage consistency checker, I'd have to say Ancestry's Tree Checker is not as robust. Interestingly, I did not receive any warnings about siblings too close in age, or parents too old or young to have children (which can be helpful clues to grandparents raising grandchildren as their own, adopted children, non-parental events/misattributed parents or potentially incorrect birth dates). I do get these warning for a small number of people on MyHeritage (but I'm still looking for records to help me properly resolve). The 2 current options for this feature are "duplicates" and "other possible issues" but I've found no information on what those "other possible issues" it looks for may be.
From the Tree Checker, you can also access many other Advanced Filtering options such as: Family Line, Events and Places, Possible Errors, Hints, and filtering by Tree Tags. You were already able to filter by Tree Tags from your tree, but on this screen you can combine this with any of these other options. Of all the ProTools features, this is likely to be the one I will use most often and will be the highest value to me.
So, what's my overall opinion? I'd give Ancestry.com ProTools 3 out of 5 stars right now. Unless you have a compelling need for the tools or just like to try out new features, it's probably not worth the money at this point. But, and this is worth remembering, they could add new tools in the future. If they do expand the offering, I would certainly hope additional ProTools would be included in any existing ProTools subscription. And with room for this new feature to grow, it could potentially become much more useful over time. For the moment, I'm going to keep the subscription. Those on a budget may want to really consider if these tools are worth the cost. Had they been $4.99 or even $5.99 per month (even as a limited time sale price) I bet more users would jump on the bandwagon to try them. But $9.99 a month is a lot for many users to swallow. Only time will tell if this will catch on. I can't blame them for looking for new revenue streams. After all, companies are in business to make money. And, as users, we all want to see new features and enhancements on sites we use regularly. But I'm not convinced they may not have made the price a bit unattractive to a large portion of their user base. These are just my personal opinions after one day of testing out the new features. Your mileage may vary.
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