It’s gotten to the point where I’m thinking about letting my subscription to Ancestry expire. I used to find enjoyment in working on my family tree, but lately it’s been more frustrating than rewarding.
For the past few weeks, some of Ancestry’s archives have been showing Black ancestors as White. For example, when I added Pierce Mathis’s death certificate to his profile, he was listed as a Black male. Recently, I noticed that it had changed to him being listed as White.
I realized that this was a bug when I searched for someone who was Black in this archive and received no results. I don’t know how long this has been going on, but upon further investigation, I noticed that numerous South Carolina Death Records had this error as well. I reported it, and it remained like this for weeks before finally changing to Non-White.
It’s been a frustrating experience lately trying to work on my family tree using Ancestry. Between Black ancestors being listed as White, large amounts of South Carolina death records having inaccurate racial designations, and missing city directory archives, it’s hard to trust the integrity of the information on the site. I’ve decided to use my subscription time to focus on strengthening my tree on my own computer. For example, adding Enumeration Districts to keep track of people and making sure to keep screenshots of all my sources in case anything is removed from Ancestry. It’s important to be cautious when relying on Ancestry, or any company, for your family tree research.
