OneGreatFamily.com

A few minutes ago, I got off the phone with a customer service agent at One Great Family.  I've pretty much ignored that site for quite a long time.  In the past several weeks, they've been advising me that my "...family tree is growing!"  Well, aside from a new grandbaby born a week ago, I'm not too confident that there are many (or any) ancestors that I could be made aware of.  Perhaps there are collateral relatives, but not anything that I'd get particularly excited about.

Today, I decided to take a new, fresh look at One Great Family.  It took a while to figure out my username and password eventually figuring out the right combination.  I originally signed on with them in 2002!  There's no telling when I started to "ignore" them.  Certainly it was quite a while ago!

So I had questions, and I hoped they had answers.  I'm no big fan of FAQ's so I found a phone number and left a message.  They got back to me within a few hours...not bad!  So after a brief overview of my not so close relationship, I asked how much a membership would cost.  Ready for this?  Only $14.95 per month OR $79.95 per year.  "Wait a minute," I asked, "$14.95 per month is $179.40 per year!"  She assured me that the annual subscription represented a really great deal.  I guess so!  "Can you or someone else tell me why I would need a subscription?"  She explained that users upload family data and One Great Family matches up your upload with what others have uploaded.  It was clear to me that this is not the best way to gather genealogical information. To make sure i had that right, I asked if their site was full of user data, unsourced user data?  That's correct, she advised.

Well, I told her that unsourced data would be useless to me and probably to any serious family researcher, professional or otherwise.  I really believe that One Great Family is doing more to harm good, solid research than it's doing to promote it.  so i simply thanked her for the information, removed myself from their mailing lists and removed the "Affiliate" link at my website www.oldbones.info.

 

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350"] English: The Yuan Dynasty family tree. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]

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