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Last Updated Sept. 22, 2012

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I reported earlier today that ancestry sent out an update to Family Tree Maker 2012 for Windows, and Family Tree Maker for MAC. I tried to sync Julie’s tree, and, well, it kind of makes me wonder if they even tried to fix our problem with very large trees. I had pretty much given up on calling the Ancestry support line, but being a bit obsessive, I decided to give them another try. Understand that things seem to work just fine until we get to Julie’s “Monster” tree.

My call went pretty much as expected. First level support first needs to talk to Julie since this is her account. Then they start the process by flailing at problems that I’m not reporting. Then they figure out that I actually HAVE reported the problem before, and that the development team IS actually aware of the problem. Given the fact that I’ve done this nearly 10 times, I’m getting pretty frustrated on these calls by this time. We finally get down to it, and she says “sir, this problem has been reported many times, and uninstalling and reinstalling the program has fixed it every time.” I think I hurt my credibility with the poor first level support person by refusing this suggestion - which, by the way, I’m HEARING FOR THE FIRST TIME from Ancestry support. I regain a bit of credibility when she is able to go offline for a bit and verify that indeed I actually have called in before and my problem is actually being actively worked by the development team - or so she says. 

Recreation/Paraphrasing on dialog from this point:

Ancestry Support: “Sir, if you refuse to uninstall/reinstall - which is what the support team recommends - then would you please send them your crash report so that they can see what’s wrong.” 

Me: “Well, it wasn’t actually a crash - it ate up all my ram, and then proceeded to consume my swap space - and then it just stopped consuming CPU cycles.”

Ancestry Support: “Okay, please just send them the crash report.”

Me: “Well, the crash report has already been sent to Apple - can’t you get it from them?”

Ancestry Support: “No, sir, we’re not the same company.” (really?! my goodness, now that’s a surprise - you’re names both begin with “A”)

Me: “Well, can you help me find the existing logs?”

Ancestry Support: “No sir, I really don’t know how to do that. Please just recreate the problem and capture the new log report and send that to support@ancestry.com in reply to our email telling you what to do.”

Me: “You sent me an email. That’s the FIRST ONE I’VE GOTTEN from Ancestry on this matter - why is that?! Anyway, you realize that will take me around 2 hours?”

Ancestry Support: “Yes, sir, that’s what we need you to do.”

Sooooo, I did a quick google search and figured out how to find my log reports - I had 2 spin and 2 hang reports, so I zipped them up and forwarded them along.

NOW I’m uninstalling and reinstalling - I’m torn as to which outcome I desire most. If it works, hooray and we have our backups. The downside is that this would encourage ridiculous suggestions from support people. What it says is that their software would have been self-corrupted by their own updating process - I guess anyway. I can’t think of any other half reasonable answer.

I guess I’ll let you know how that goes. AND, I’ll try not to turn this into too much of a crusade here in this blog - although it’s tempting…

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