tl;dr: You know how when fly-by-night growth-hacking startups suddenly shut down and do little to help their users export their data because the users never had to pay a dime to run the servers, and someone always comments, "If you're not paying, you're the product, not the customer"?
This is not one of those situations. Ancestry.com charged as much as $240 annually for its service [1]. Furthermore, the MyFamily.com social network was just one small part of Ancestry.com, meaning the parent company still has the money (and I would think, the actual servers/backups) to make its paying customers whole here. What the OP describes is a seriously incompetent handling of a shutdown...and one of the variety that is most painful for customers.
My Family had years of chat history and photos on "MyFamily.com" when they shut down. This included information from members who have now passed away.
I agree fully, their handling of it was insensitive and incompetent and I'll never have anything to do with any of the "Ancestry" products again.
Fortunately we found Spokt.com which (after a few rocky starts) was able to "sort of" import most of the data into our new Spokt account. I feel terrible for those families who didn't and permanently lost a large chunk of their family history.
You know how when fly-by-night growth-hacking startups suddenly shut down and do little to help their users export their data because the users never had to pay a dime to run the servers
Yeah, this is a shitty thing to do to any users. Always make sure there's a way for them to export their data. After all, it isn't really yours - they just let you have it because you seemed trustworthy. Don't betray that.
Ancestry has a borderline monopoly on web-based genealogy, and unfortunately doesn't seem to be a very good steward for that data.
Generally, the genealogy community is very open and sharing. Distant relatives (n cousins nth removed) will spend hours helping you out. Random people will go to local libraries or town halls to pull hard copies of vital records. LDS has one of the largest free genealogy libraries in the world.
Then here comes Ancestry. $240/yr. to use their software, which puts everything you do behind a paywall. Want to share your family tree with others? They have to pay Ancestry for the privilege.
There's serious value in digitized records that might well be worth the subscription fee alone. But these are public records that Ancestry has bought the exclusive rights to digitize. They're aggressively monetizing public data while shutting out competition.
It's great that family history is so easy for the masses, but I'm worried the long-term future is going to be silo'd and less effective in the long run.
The Church is meticulous about good record keeping (which is what makes them so good at genealogy in the first place), and every official member of the LDS church has a unique member identification number, used for things like tracking donations, ordinance records, and, of course, genealogy. Nowadays, the vast majority of these records are digitized and you can access them online through Church-owned-and-operated websites. If you happen not to be in the system yet (maybe you were baptized in the jungles of New Guinea and have only just made it back to civilization), it's pretty simple to meet up with a bishop or clerk who can verify your paper records and tell you what your membership number is, which will let you set up an account on Church websites.
So, to summarize, the Church knows who its members are, and knows how to associate them with online identities. When one of them wants free access to Ancestry.com, it's basically the same process as "Sign in with Google" and such- you tell Ancestry that you're LDS, Ancestry asks the Church's servers if you're telling the truth, and the Church's authentication system teels Ancestry to let you in.
You ask the membership clerk of your ward for your membership number, which you use to upgrade your familysearch.org account to an LDS account. Then ancestry.com uses OAuth to get access to your familysearch account.
Philadelphia BMD. New York State Census records (State off-year, not Federal). Swedish BMD (previously available online, then pulled down). Czech BMD (ditto). The list goes on... Check the genealogy blogs, of which there are many, for details.
Waaaay ahead of you: I'm a genealogy nerd and I built an open source archival records management system (Apache Solr + MySQL + PHP) called LeafSeek to do just that. Won second place at the RootsTech Developer Challenge for it.
I currently work with two major non-profit genealogy groups to put their record collections online for free and easy searches, without handing them over to for-profit groups like Ancestry. So far we're at 700,000+ records online using my code, and the newest "big" addition is the Israeli State Archives agreeing to put their British Mandate period marriage and divorce certificates online via one of the non-profits using the code.
I'm planning on launching the system as a multi-tenant SaaS one of these days, once my kids are a little older. :-)
Three or four tiered plan, based on number of records uploaded and desire for additional bells and whistles (personalized subdomain, whitelabel for better known libraries and archives, ability to keep some part of records private except to users who are affiliated with your group through offline membership, etc.).
No freemium, only paying clients. BUT a price discount if users allow (1) auto backup of datasets in CSV format to Internet Archive through their S3 system, even if the data is "darked" and not visible (I'm on Archive Team and I also created their "Antecedents" collection of genealogy-related web crawls: https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_antecedents) and (2) they explicitly put their data in the public domain.
Pie in the sky idea: create API for higher tier paying users to allow them to license their data directly to Ancestry, MyHeritage, FindMyPast, etc. Which would flip the pay-for-data model on its ear, allowing users to regain control of their own datasets, and for-profit data brokers to pay them for access.
Thank you! In a perfect world there could be a free plan for small time data publishers, individual researchers without a lot of funds, etc. But you have to be very wary of recreating the RootsWeb scenario from 12 years ago, where a giant collection of genealogy records created through volunteer-run goodwill gets in over its head financially and needs a white knight to come bail them out. In that case, the white knight was Ancestry, who (amazingly) haven't shut them down all these years. But I am aware that any new project to put archival data online MUST be fiscally responsible and prudent because it is such a big responsibility. This is customer data unlike most others.
To that end, I will also be rejecting VC and bootstrapping the venture. Ain't nobody going to be flipping this site or acqui-hiring that data. This is going to be done for the long-term.
Have you thought about incorporating as either a non-profit or a social B corp? Neither prevents you from drawing income from the project, but might increase the chances of using grant money or kickstarter/indiegogo funds to further the cause.
I have thought about, and rejected, the non-profit idea, as they have so much overhead to run (tons of paperwork) and might limit any political advocacy I might want to do in connection with the desire for more open data/records policies. But I don't know much about the social B corp. Would need to do more study...
That's fine, but someone has to physically go to the records office and scan in thousands of documents to be digitised. That's the problem with Ancestry, they have a massive digital archive and the funds to keep growing it.
Some copies of the census are digitised already, but the further you go back the less likely that is. And a lot of the information people want originates abroad (e.g. UK, Germany, Italy, France, etc).
I'm working with an organization to collect real estate parcel data for the entire US and open source it. I track every county or district that has parcel data, I built a workflow to get the data from them, manage the ingest of the data, and a separate workflow if they're difficult and I have to FOIA them for it (via muckrock.com). There is a cost, but as always, everything has a cost.
Same deal, but closer to what Distributed Proofreaders for Project Gutenberg does with scanning.
It can be done. Funds and organization would be necessary, but let's not think its some herculean task.
You don't actually need to scan all the images, just transcribe the main points of the data (names, dates, places), make that data searchable, and then provide information about how a user could go about ordering a copy of the original data if needed.
Ancestry was given that monopoly by their users. Served up to them on a silver platter. Without Ancestry, some other business would have come along as long as the users are so willing to put their work behind a paywall. The core fault lies with the users who are willing to do such.
How in the world is being the victim of a crime against your will similar to choosing to buy and use a pay-walled product? Especially for a service that isn't fulfilling some need?
I don't agree with your characterization of the HN ethos. I would suggest the ethos is a little closer to users lack collectivization, and we're talking about how a service provider has taken advantage of that. It's a social question, not a legal one.
In the case of ancestry it is not just their users, but also the users extended family. One of my relatives found it necessary to put me in there and I've had a really hard time to get them to delete me.
I asked a question; I never made any claim that could even be a strawman.
(If we are going to go by exactly what we said and not the implications of the words we used, though hopefully we can agree that would actually be dishonest.)
> It’s natural to assume that service providers like Ancestry will be good custodians of our data,
No, never. Not Ancestry or anybody else. In this very moment my computer is running my daily back up my Google Drive (customers write stuff there) to my USB disk (I know, I should need a better disaster recovery solution). Not that Google doesn't provide a good service, but I don't trust them to preserve all my data until I need it, possibly tens of years in the future. I better care about it myself.
I consider anything stored "on the cloud" as expendable. If I really care about it I back it up in multiple copies. I have a couple of servers where I send encrypted backups using duplicity.
Is this too much for the average computer/tablet user? Yes, but there won't be a market for proper consumer backup until enough people has been burned by this kind of things and all cloud services will start offering an export procedure.
Meanwhile I think it's worth using self hosted services. For my company I have a self hosted redmine with all the details of my projects.
> > It’s natural to assume that service providers like Ancestry will be good custodians of our data,
> No, never. Not Ancestry or anybody else
I respectfully disagree: it is natural for people to assume that companies won't callously discard their customers’ data. If it wasn't natural, we wouldn't need to have so much effort going towards education about the terms of service to watch out for and how to make your own copies. Too many people have a mental model for corporations which grossly exaggerates the level of stability and long-term planning.
Ok, you have a point. Trust is natural (think about the attitude of little children) and education goes like "don't trust strangers". Hoping for the best often is a sub optimal strategy. I was starting from that assumption.
Trust isn't for "little children." Trust is what makes the world go round. I trust that my bank won't close overnight and steal all my money. I trust that the food I buy is safe for human consumption. I trust that random people on the street won't attack me because they feel like it.
"Hoping for the best" (or perhaps "trusting that people won't screw me over") is actually an extremely good strategy -- far better than not trusting anyone with anything. I can hire third parties to cook my food, do my taxes, handle my banking, even babysit my children after a background check (where I have to trust the background checking company) and a brief interview. If I couldn't trust people, I simply wouldn't be able to function in the modern world.
So I have a company, who I have paid to store my data. The company has been good so far, I use their services frequently, and I have every reason to trust them (they've had my credit card info, and my family's for years, haven't screwed me over, haven't lost any other data in all this time...) The company is shutting down, and they explicitly tell me that they will let me download all of my data, including text conversations. I download the data, only to open it weeks later and find that the company has failed to do what they said they would. In this one particular case, the strategy of "trust" has failed. However, in the long run, it's made my life a heck of a lot better.
We pick banks, stores and neighborhoods based on reputation. We trust some of them because they proved to be good and we don't trust others (I bet there are areas of the world and maybe of your city where you won't walk alone in the night.)
We get educated to trust according to reputation.
Personally I don't trust much Internet services because so many of them die young. I always wonder how many years any of the services I have to use for work will stay with me and how I can move my data somewhere else, in the few cases it makes sense (example: you can export Trello's data, but then what?) My customers and I use them because they are so convenient but I'm sure that sooner or later one of them will die in the middle of a project and we will be burnt. I have redmine wikis from 8 years ago. I'll have Trello's boards for the projects I'm working on now in 2022?
But I also don't trust much any "normal" company. I expect that they make their interests first, mine maybe. I buy from them but caveat emptor.
I think you're wrong if you're saying that "it's NOT natural to assume ...". For sure it's natural to assume a company whose sole preserve is digitisation and archive of family history -- which it has been doing for several years for millions of people -- is going to be a "good custodian".
Is that the best way to proceed? Nope, abject paranoia seems like the only way to preserve data -- assuming there is a nuclear war, have you archived your data on a different continent, have you got a plan for retrieval!?!
I like to backup my data to storage that I own too and I try to keep a copy of it on all my devices but while storage is getting cheaper everyday, hardware makers try to limit local storage on mobile devices every way they can to increase cloud business (even remove microSD card support), Google being a good example...
You would think that by now a $650 phone would have a lot more then 32gb of storage.... But even if you have a phone that supports an external microSD card, Google makes it difficult to write to it using a 3rd party Android app (stating security as a reason).
There should be a law that prevent companies from keeping root to themselves on devices that you own.
A service's customer data must persist somewhere. "On the cloud" is a marketing abstraction to fool customers into a false sense of integrity.
Just remember that most cloud services do not do backups, do not have a disaster recovery / BIA plan, do not use ECC memory in network, compute and storage systems. Users must take personal responsibility for ensuring their private data is safe, because wishing is not a winning strategy.
While compute servers aren't backed up this is by design (use storage). Storage is indeed backed up and replicated. Also most assuredly there are extensive disaster recovery plans.
The cloud isn't for everyone, but FUD doesn't help.
While compute servers aren't backed up this is by design (use storage). Storage is indeed backed up and replicated.
And yet, you are referring to pages about redundancy, not backup. Redundancy helps when a disk, server, or perhaps even data center fails. Backups help when your cloud storage provider makes an error and removes your data from redundant storage.
There have been enough incidents to show that cloud computing alone cannot be trusted [1]. Unfortunately, most cloud services are data silos, so you couldn't even backup data if you wanted to.
And then we haven't talked yet about data leaks. Some larger incident than last year's iCloud leak will probably happen sometime. Hopefully then people will realize that client-side encryption is important.
For one the iCloud leaks had not one thing to do with cloud computing. Nor did the dropbox one you linked. Those were application level problems, and could well have occurred with on premises based storage (obviously with a public interface for an icloud issue). Let me assure you that bad synch algorithms have caused data loss before the cloud. Applications can fail to backup or record things.
For one the iCloud leaks had not one thing to do with cloud computing. Nor did the dropbox one you linked. Those were application level problems, and could well have occurred with on premises based storage (obviously with a public interface for an icloud issue).
Sure. But the difference is that if you manager your own storage, you know what backups are made, etc. Dropbox claims that backups are made, but these users lost data regardless.
rsync.net uses ECC memory and always has (since 2001).
We do not do backups, however, unless you are paying for geo-redundant storage. If you use single site storage, the idea is that we are the backup.
Since the conversation has drifted this way, let me also point out that we have s3cmd and gsutil in our platform, so if you're paranoid about trusting data to google or amazon (and to some degree, you should be) you can easily import/export to an independent cloud platform (rsync.net).
I wonder how historians of the future will look back on today's time period, knowing that we had the technology to cheaply and easily document our time period for the future, and that we opted not to out of short-term financial interests. It may actually be harder for them to do things like construct family genealogies for today's people than for those living in the 1700's because with digital data stored in the cloud, preciously little of it will survive across the next few centuries.
There should be a role here for government, to let people give digital data in permanent archival for historical purposes. But given how poorly governments are preserving their own digital data, I doubt it could actually work.
This exaggerates the problem. There is more preserved data about people than ever before, just like there was more preserved data last century than there was the previous century. There is simply vastly more data collected. I speculate that deleting 20% of this century's data would still leave an order of magnitude more data about people than was recorded last century.
I think future historians will look back in the same way we do now. We're horrified that people discarded, burned or reused records from every century in history, but technology allows us to record and preserve more every year.
I think the problem is in assuming only 20% will be deleted. When you consider companies going out of business, technical obsolescence, etc. the figure will be closer to 99% after 50 years, that's my prediction.
Jason Scott in some talk I watched of his, made the comment that we're not the ones who get to decide what stays or goes. We simply don't have the perspective. Therefore we should just keep all of it.
> I wonder how historians of the future will look back on today's time period, knowing that we had the technology to cheaply and easily document our time period for the future, and that we opted not to out of short-term financial interests.
People of the future will probably be very disappointed with us about a great many things that we could have done with our technology, knowledge and resources, but neglected or opted not to do out of short-term financial interests.
But I don't think properly documenting our time period will be very high on that list.
I'd love to be wrong.
If in a few hundred years, there's people, society, culture and at some point again a level of civilisation and technology that allows them to dig back into the past, and the worst thing they'll have to say about our addiction to short-term financial interests is "aww, if only they had documented their time period better", then I ... well, the only likely scenario I can think of is if we also somehow manage to sell out severe-global-brain-damage-in-a-couple-of-centuries for our short-term financial interests (surely right now, there are some very smart people working on this very idea).
No. This is what historians of the future will say if we would indeed meticulously document our current time period, and they could read about our day-to-day lives, important events, culture, media, etc.:
"... they did WHAT?! while the planet was ... and the oceans were still ... they burned WHAT?! in order to be able to ... gosh well at least thanks to our ancestor's meticulous documenting, and millions of hours of video footage we can now theorize what these 'kittens' are supposed to have looked like ... mammals used to have hair?? ..."
No, I think we better start deleting and encrypting our data. To save face.
(small disclaimer: I am half-kidding, of course. While I am not particularly proud of the 'big picture' behaviour of my species in this particular era, we shouldn't actually try and hide our planetary blunders in shame, but indeed document them so that future civilisations can learn from us, and who knows, maybe one day can forgive us)
Well, there is a whole family who will look at hosted services with a much more jaded eye now. Who wouldn't?
Truth is, this kind of garbage devalues everybody. When a large family like this loses out in such a painful way, word gets around. Clearly they are not alone either. People who tend to be into this stuff are very seriously into it. Understandable. It matters.
Future offerings, however well their intent and execution might be, will have to work to overcome the painful experiences. And that is just a waste.
One thing nagging at me though. Did they really just delete it? Seems that having a fall back would make great sense, if anything, for legal reasons.
Or maybe it's better to have it really, really gone. Limit the potentials, so to speak?
From time to time, I export various things. Just ordinary worry, but I'm reasonably informed. Who here isn't?
Perhaps ordinary people really do need to advance to the next level of literacy. "The basics" today are different. In some ways, simpler. In other ways, potentially more complex.
Just saw danso comment. Yeah, my thoughts too. It was possible to treat people right. Do they really just not care?
If this were me, I would have a very hard time sleeping at night, particularly given some options. It was easy enough to set up and make the money...
Word should get around. Centralized services suck. I long for the days when people cared that the internet was decentralized, and some of the best apps were too. Email, the Web, even IRC. We can do it today, but instead the startups want to capture as much of the market as possible and rule their little world while maintaining huge datacenters.
One can only hope word will get around, and people will wake up to the fact that "the cloud" is not a fairytale place of infinite storage and security where you no longer have to worry about database backups because "it is in the cloud"
But have people ever worried? From what I remember from before the cloud became popular, and from people who maintain the old habits, people never really worried, they just kept their precious files in a $10 USB flash drive or 5-year-old HD and then flailed around when it broke.
Certainly. But on a bad drive, usually some amount of data could be recovered. If some cloud storage disappears, it's immediately over.
Also, one other factor that may be important to the discussion is that the USB drive was private. Now somebody hacks a cloud service and your data is potentially in a Bittorrent swarm the next day. Seeing what people put on the net nowadays, I don't think they realize the difference.
Isn't that partly down to how marketing breaks the world for us. Marketing tells us you can "keep all your files safe on a USB drive" (or whatever) and that the cloud is the perfect place to store data that wouldn't be safe at home and other such insidious lies. Some people believe all that.
Perhaps that "safe" needs an addendum to be truthful, "MTBF is 5years at which point usually 2% of drive data is corrupted; this is not a suitable backup solution" or "our cloud storage facility has lost some data from 1% of all our users (2100 users) in the last year; 5.2% of users in the last 5 years" ... now that would be revolutionary.
Even if marketing had managed to convince people that USB flash drives never stopped working, it was obvious that all files would be lost if the drive got lost, stolen, smashed or soaked. I frankly don't think we can pin this on marketing.
Some people have, but most businesses did. Today I am seeing more and more business being sucked into the "cloud" hype and foregoing all locally controlled and owned systems.. This is very very very dangerous.
I started out using Ancestry's web-only approach but once I really got going on my family history (i.e. < 1800AD) I quickly hit the limits of what the web UI was offering. Many others hit this wall as well, and that is why there is cheap desktop software, Family Tree Maker, that integrates seamlessly with the online web UI. My entire tree (~4.5gb) lives offline on my Mac, is backed up with Arq and is two-way sync'd to Ancestry's online version. Of all the providers out there that have "data lock-in", I really don't consider Ancestry one of them. If you really care about your data, keep the copy-of-record on your computer. If Ancestry's online service ever folds, your official copy will keep working perfectly.
This isn't the same thing as replacing a social network service, but the actual trees do capture comments, stories, submissions, etc. from other users.
How is the data stored? Can anything else read that data?
Having a local copy is better than not, especially one you can back up, but in 50 years it won't help much if the format is too difficult for anything else to read.
(Honest question, though. I don't have this software, so I don't know.)
GEDCOM is "good enough" to get out of the software for most things. I think you can export pretty much everything into some kind of readable format, but the multimedia aspects of it aren't necessarily captured by GEDCOM. You have all the pictures and things there as well, but I don't think every single link will wind up in the generated file. Maybe things have changed a little -- I just haven't had much need to export into GEDCOM.
Basically anyone who ever set foot in the U.S. is 99.9% guaranteed to be found electronically now. That will take you to where they came from and in most cases that original generation will be known. Since people did not travel much (as we know it today), chances are they are mostly from that place , wherever it is, for some time back. Thanks to Napoleon (you don't thank him much, do you?), standard records have been kept across at least Europe back to their inception in ~1810. Prior to that, records devolve into individual church parishes and are mostly in Latin. It is super easy to pick up the Napoleonic civil record format in any language. I never could quite grasp the hand-written ink-well pen Latin records of the late 1700s so I don't know how much further back I will be able to go.
I do have to give a special shout-out to the Polish national archives as well as the U.S. National Archives people in Maryland. I was able to deal with the Poles entirely online and request hundreds of records which they reproduced for a reasonable fee in a short time. The U.S. archives also went out of their way to help me. Hell, even the FBI FOIA process worked well and gave me a valuable dossier. The one awesome lead that let me down was the NYPD FOIL request I made. A relative many generations back ran with Al Capone when he was in Brooklyn and was gunned down. The NYPD never caught the killer and supposedly had a hat left at the scene and other evidence. Murder investigations are kept indefinitely so they should still have it in some warehouse somewhere, but they couldn't find it after searching for it manually. (Digitize all the things, people!)
It depends on your heritage (I am of northwestern European and American descent, so my records are very good) but Ancestry makes it very easy, to their credit. A few minutes after you've added a new family member, Ancestry begins suggesting historical records and public trees (I try to avoid relying on the latter) that may reveal additional information about them, including who their family members are. You then mark which information to import.
So essentially you would start by inputting the family history you know, and then let Ancestry start making suggestions. It still takes plenty of manual intervention but I've taken their suggestions back to the 1500s in some cases.
OT a bit, but I am surprised that the author's family managed to keep a family-based social network going for so long.
When my family tried to create one on Geni, it brought a few crazy relatives out of the woodwork, and Geni's "growth hacking" strategy of spamming anyone who was invited to join the tree led to angry real-life confrontations between inviters and invitees. Our family tree is maintained a little, but the social aspects died a quick death.
I use mbsync to pull my Gmail messages over IMAP into a local Maildir/. Works fine, though it requires a generated app password if you have two-factor auth set up on Google.
What archive format would you back up to, and what application would you use? I looked at this a few years ago and, if I recall, the choices weren't obvious.
And this is why I tell the spouse to periodically back up everything from the Ancestry.com account to local GEDCOM files. Never trust an online service with the only copy of your data.
I'm not sure about that: the converse is closer to the truth now due to copyright law, giving people's private family correspondence and data to historical organisations without the families say so seems as wrong as wiping the data. Ancestry could have kept the data archived and offered it up for download to their users for a payment - their whole raison d'etre is supposed to be preserving family history after all.
It would be interesting to know why they shutdown the service, presumably not making enough profit, whether anything replaced it?
Moreover, why not make an effort to warn users? My best guess is that Ancestry intended to export the data properly, hit a technical snag, and made the cynical decision to not follow through, in the hopes that nobody would call the company out on it.
Perhaps it isn't the cynical decision, rather it's the result of nobody being left to turn on the lights, let alone handle a technical task. Once companies enter shutdown mode, there's frequently nobody left to complain to. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know the specifics here.
Ancestry.com still exists as a (paid) service, they just shut down this subset of their offering, so it's definitely not "nobody left to turn on the lights".
I'm surprised Ancestry.com doesn't charge people for the data recovery. They would clearly pay since many paid $60 for the third party service beforehand.
There is no way I can believe Ancestry.com doesn't have the technical talent to pull the raw data from the system pretty trivially. Unless it was running on some obscure in-house database backend that doesn't exist anymore and thus can't be read, I don't see why they can't put an engineer on this project for a month [and if it takes them that long...] and at least give people the raw data. Or partner with Spokt or whatever and have them charge a fee to transfer it if they want to cover their costs. People are willing to pay for this data, even if it is incomplete or difficult to digest in the delivered format.
I also can't imagine they don't have a copy of the data somewhere... on some old magnetic backup tape or squirreled away in some DB admin's folders.
I realize the article speaks about the frustration this user had with trying to work with Ancestry.com to try to get his data back after the closure. However, has anyone gone to Ancestry and stated they will take on the liability of looking through the data and getting it into an exportable format and returning it to these users? Seems like an interesting open source project. Maybe Ancestry hasn't been given the right offer just to have the data taken off their hands.
Certainly there are legal issues and privacy issues. Are these really insurmountable? If enough people really want their data, I somehow doubt that this couldn't be worked through. And I absolutely cannot imagine that Ancestry just deleted all of it when they shut down. It's probably sitting in cold storage somewhere.
Isn't Ancestry a subsidiary of MyLife.com now? What incentive have they to preserve this data, since their money is made off "Nice identity you have there, be a shame if something happened to it" spam?
This is not one of those situations. Ancestry.com charged as much as $240 annually for its service [1]. Furthermore, the MyFamily.com social network was just one small part of Ancestry.com, meaning the parent company still has the money (and I would think, the actual servers/backups) to make its paying customers whole here. What the OP describes is a seriously incompetent handling of a shutdown...and one of the variety that is most painful for customers.
[1] http://corporate.ancestry.com/press/press-releases/2004/01/m...