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I use it and like it. DNA and all. Yes it's expensive. I generally pay for a month, then let it expire for a few months while I catch up, then renew as needed.
It is the 900 pound gorilla of the hobby. If you want to get DNA matches, it's the first choice by far. And it has enabled me to learn an enormous amount about my family - and my wife's, and several friends who are interested.
If genealogy is your thing, do it. If you only want to half-ass it, there are alternatives.
Yikes, aren't you afraid they're going to pull a 23andme and sell all your DNA info to Saudi Arabia and God knows who else?
No. Ancestry is the big fish. 23 tried to swim in deep water without a solid established cash flow.
Also, how does someone having access to my (already public) tree matches do additional harm? My real name is globally unique. I'm Very easy to find and ID.
Same. I was adopted as an infant, and I actually used all the DNA sites to triangulate my birth family (some nice folks, some asses). I did it over ten years ago, but it would have been a lot easier today. I think it hits a lot of people, especially on a platform like Lemmy, in their Sci-Fi dystopia feels in an inchoate kind of way that makes them recoil, and it's not that there isn't any potential for abuse, just that this is a genie that's very much out of the bottle. Frankly, if anything truly awful is going to be done with autosomal DNA, the people who want to do it will simply mandate it.
Records-wise, it's a large universe and impressively interconnected. I've learned a lot about all of my families (birth, adopted, marriage), and I was able to track down the documentation necessary to support a successful application get an EU passport for my wife (her company paid for it once she told them it was plausible), and therefore our daughter. I gather that I'll be eligible for one myself in the near future, as she was legally always a citizen, and therefore she will soon have been married for twenty years.
If my paternal side were more forthcoming, I might have been able to work something out with them for a couple of other countries, as my great-grandfather was an illegal immigrant from Germany who jumped ship from a freighter in the 1920s and married a girl whose family fled the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire after WWI. Then their kid married a Canadian nurse who was actually born in the "Dominion of Newfoundland" before confederation. Somehow this ended up creating Floridians... 🤷
Also, there's a good chance your goony-ass yearbook photos are on Ancestry (among other places).
I've resolved one adoption mystery and have two more under investigation. It's very rewarding work.
I'm also working on Euro citizenship for me and my siblings. We may be too late - some international policies are changing and we may be already shut out.