Comments on old news -- Ancestry.com Focuses on Core Offerings

One side effect of being "offline" for essentially three weeks is the fact that I find out about stuff much after the initial announcement. This applies to a blog post by Ancestry.com entitled, "Ancestry.com Focuses on Core Offering." This is not much of surprise since I have been writing about the demise of one of the programs for quite a while. The five programs being discontinued on September 5, 2014 include the following;

• Genealogy.com
• MyFamily
• MyCanvas
• LegacyDNA
• Mundia – English

I have been writing about Mundia.com for a long time. See my post of February 18, 2014 entitled, "Is Mundia.com Dysfunctional?" for an example.

Ancestry.com does make an exception for Genealogy.com and explains (or not):

Genealogy.com is the exception to the rule, and will continue in a slightly different form. If you are an active member or subscriber to one of these services, you will be contacted directly with details of how to transition the information you’ve created using these services.

More information about the changes is on the Genealogy.com FAQs page.  There the explanation is a little more detailed:

Over the years we have built up a variety of products that enable our users to discover, preserve and share their family history. We recognize that there are a lot of ways that we, as a company, can make family history easier, more accessible and more fun for people all over the world.

In order to do this, we need to focus on our core offerings to ensure we're delivering the best service and best product experience to our customers. To that end, we've decided to invest more aggressively in our core Ancestry.com business and plan to retire all member activity on Genealogy.com as well as portions of the Genealogy.com service.

Current users of Genealogy.com have been given the following options for preserving their data on the website:

You will have the ability to print or export My Trees and manually print or save additional content you've uploaded until September 5, 2014. To preserve the information you've added, please log in to your account to export, print, or save your information.

This scenario is a wake up call to all of the genealogical community. Do not ever rely on one method, even an online method, to backup your genealogical data. What is happening there is reality. Since I came through the 1960s, the mantra of my generation still holds true in most cases: Trust No One Over 30. I can say that with certainty to any large commercial enterprise online or otherwise. By the way, almost all of the online genealogy companies, with a few notable exceptions, are less than 30 years old so I would have to modify the original call and shorten it to "Trust No Online Data Storage" and always rely on more than one storage media.