Sunday, December 14, 2014

AncestryDNA Circles Rolling Right Off The Page & Other Oddities


Ancestry and the little genealogists?


I've been working on those novel AncestryDNA Circles, which are currently deep in beta. Why am I  doing this when they aren't currently very interesting? Probably because I'm avoiding doing hated Christmas chores?? Ha, Ha, Ho! Ho!

When I examined my Cousin Nan's Circles I noticed she had at least one that my Mom should be in. Upon further examination we should have 3 more than we have (that we even know about?). We've each had 9 Circles since the Circles started. In an effort to forget Christmas chores I plunged into the Circles. I tried changing the information to match the Circles we should be in. This hasn't resulted in creating any new circles yet? I heard that the Circles cycle every few hours. So I would think I should see any new Circles showing up within a day or so?

I contacted Ancestry via Facebook messaging yesterday. They attempted to fix my Circles problem. Apparently they were not able to add any Circles. What they managed to do is replace one Circle ancestor with another. It appears our Circles are stuck on 9 ( I thought we had 7 but it's 9). Something is wrong which isn't allowing us to gain anymore Circles? This is what I saw last night when they tried to remedy the problem. You can see (below) one ancestor is replaced with "feature not available". This ancestor was later replaced by another ancestor.

Looking at the member trees for one Circle we're looking to join I noticed that one person doesn't even have the ancestor the Circle is based on in their tree. This person hasn't logged in since June? I take it he couldn't have changed the tree since the Circles were created?

After even brief examination it's clear the Circles are deeply mired in Beta. We hope they can fix these problems because previous search function problems remain. I got another message from Ancestry recommending I call them about the problems with our Circles. I learned to call them well before or after lunch. Backup phone Reps. apparently answer around lunch? I believe so because I called about a DNA test kit one time and the person seemed confused. They were like DNA test? Then they remembered, "Oh yay".

So now I have a new Circle but I'm still missing 3 Circles we should be in? If we can get them all at once I would be satisfied. The Christmas chores are looking better now.


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