My Love Hate Relationship with Ancestry.com, continued

I have a few relationships with Ancestry.com. My earliest is my use of the Rootsweb pages, message boards and WorldConnect family tree. At some point, Rootsweb was acquired by Ancestry and I had to set up an ancestry account to post messages and update my tree. Occasionally, I have tried a trial membership of Ancestry's data service, but since I have a pretty well-developed family tree I find that within the trial period I find the small amounts of additional information related to my own family. More recently, I manage some dna test kits for a relative using AncestryDNA. I've made some family connections there, but am hampered by not being an Ancestry subscriber, and so not having access to family trees that are linked to the dna matches.

So two new factors to add to my thoughts about Ancestry.com . The first relates to the Rootsweb WorldConnect trees. Ancestry has just reworked this service. Apparently, many Ancestry.com subcribers also had Rootsweb accounts and used the same passwords for both. Since Rootsweb is over 20 years old, it apparently was easy to hack into and someone did, thereby gaining access to a bunch of Ancestry account passwords. So Rootsweb was shut down, with bits and pieces coming back online as they become secure. What's the point? I (and others who use the Rootsweb WorldConnect family tree) have been unable to update our trees in about two years, while Ancestry updates the underlying software. Which has finally been done. Now, however, by posting a tree, it is no longer mine. Technically, it's mine, but Ancestry users may attach any parts of it - up to it's entirety, I assume - to their own family trees, which then becomes theirs. I realize that I have no copyright to the information itself, but I was okay with making information available to people to copy - more or less manually - if they were interested enough to do that. I'm not ready to provide for free to a paid service 25 years of research that can be copied at the click of a button. So I'm looking for some other way place to make my tree publicly available, but under my own control.

But on the Love side of the equation - which doesn't often happen between me and Ancestry - they are testing a Beta version of a dna matching service. It now gives me limited access to trees associated with the dna kits, allowing me to find a match to my own family tree. This is a huge improvement in the usefulness of AncestryDNA. I would now recommend AncestryDNA for anyone seriously researching their genealogy. (MyHeritage also allows trees to be attached to dna kits. 23andMe does not, though they do provide some other helpful information.)

P.S.: I completely understand how useful and valuable Ancestry is for many people. In many ways, it's just not right for me. Except for the new Beta version of AncestryDNA ...