Legacy Tree Genealogists Omdömen 85

I would not recommend LegacyTree. They failed to deliver any output on one of my objectives because they had used all the allotted project time. Without consulting me they made a bad prioritisation decision to limit data collection to a period far too short to cover the years relevant to this objective. To compound the problem they refused to acknowledge this error and do anything to rectify the issue.

For the benefit of Trustpilot readers and to avoid any doubt my additional comments below respond to LegacyTree’s reply to my initial post.

I contacted my Project Manager and LegacyTree management as soon as I became aware of the problem and well before my initial Trustpilot post. On my project LegacyTree’s statement, “If they run into issues they communicate with you about what you’d like to do.”, is incorrect. They never did this. The first I knew there was a problem was when I received the final report.

I tried to do research myself with what info I had, but kept hitting a brick wall. I had a great life with my adoptive family and really had no desire to look for my birth family. Most of my adopted family is either deceased or out of touch. I recently lost my wife of 46 years left me with with no reason to go on. So I decided to search for my birth family as a reason to get up in the morning. Your folks found six half siblings and a first cousin still living. I emailed them all and have only gotten a response from my cousin. Even if I don't get a response from my half brothers and sisters, it was worth the journey. The folks who did the research efficient, knowledgeable, friendly and compassionate. I was very lucky to have been connected to Legacy Tree and you all remain in my thoughts.

Sadly we were really disappointed at the support and result we received from legacy Tree Genealogists. We were really keen to understand more about my wife’s Italian heritage which sadly did not pass though as her mum sadly died early in her life. We hoped using legacy tree that they could help us but we were so disappointed. Paying around US$5000 and giving some what we thought was a good project brief and upfront information we hoped with little expectation to have something back to pass down to our children . Sadly the project took much longer than expected with requests for further funds for expenses to get someone onsite for one side of the family before even considering what we had asked for and then adding more for that. We raised the project with legacy tree in Feb/Mar 2023 with some preliminary desk work being completed by them then with local help needed . We had to wait until November for this ( although to be fair they did say they could possibly get someone they had found to look a month or so earlier but we decided to wait to get their first choice local researcher to review . All in all not a great experience and only 50% of family tree review we hoped an thought paid for ( due to further fees requested we asked them to just focus on my wife’s fathers side) final bound document disappointing with out of focus documents and no real idea even where my wife’s parents lived in Rome in The 30s despite lots of official documents that sadly we cannot personally translate . We were hoping to use legacy tree again for my Irish family tree. We won’t

The Legacy Tree Genealogical team has built up a family tree where I thought it never could be found. They have gone into Poland and archives in a fruitful and productive study...and done it with accuracy and precision. So far I have had 3 small projects done for the Polak family in Kozowka, Mikulince, Tarnopol, Galacia, Austrian Empire ..and it has been done within my means and with great success. Thank you.
With great appreciation...Donna Danuta Polak Saunders

I debated on writing this review. I wanted to desperately to be one of these other glowing reviews, as this was actually one of the elements I considered when first engaging LegacyTree. However, if I were a prospective customer, I would want to know about this experience, thus, I will leave my review below. This has already been provided to the company and I spoke with a manager, but it is what it is at this point. I expect they might reply, but the emotional damage is done.

Beginning: When I engaged with the sales representative, she did a fantastic job at explaining the packages and getting me excited. For context, this research project was a birthday gift to myself as I now live in the UK and wanted to go on a genealogy trip to find my ancestors. I purchased the “Standard50” package to research 2 goals. It is worth noting that a large amount of ancestry prework had been done along with DNA to help get the process started.

Becoming a customer: Once I signed and paid, this is where my experience started to deteriorate. In terms of Project Management (PM), Legacy Tree makes it clear that PM time is charged to research time and therefore, they keep it brief. However, for the small updates I did expect from my PM, these were lacking. When I did finally engage, my PM could not confidently tell me where we were on the journey and how much research time was remaining. Not being able to say things like 'we are 50%/60%/etc of the way through your project" made me lose confidence in this organisation. In addition to the above, the PM, who is supposed to act in my interests (EVEN after spending time briefing her on my goals), did not sound the alarm when it was clear 1 of my goals would not be met. I had to intervene and redirect the effort. This is bizarre to me - why was I doing so much work for a firm I hired? I feel that my project was mis-managed, thus leading to the second reason I am disappointed.

Secondly, my 2 objectives did not have much overall progress / my actual goals were not achieved. Based on the initial conversations and clarifications spent at the beginning of the engagement, I expected more progress (even if they could not get to my exact goal, I do not feel they made significant progress for the allotted time). For example, while the summary report is lengthy, it is not clear (in plain, simple language) on which ancestors have been successfully verified versus which more research needed. While I did escalate this to a Manager and my report was re-reviewed, my overall impression with LegacyTree made me feel a bit like a number after the contract was signed. I did not feel like my target outcomes were kept at top of mind until I myself had to intervene. They spent time on 'bonus' areas of research which I did appreciate, but again, my actual documented targets were not met.

Outcome: I did receive an output. The binder is sturdy and the original documents ordered were nice to have. However as stated above - the summary report can be confusing and repetitive (i.e. they included a reformatted copy of a family tree from ancestry.com as a result). Overall, while I can sense that the research talent is good, I am not sure if I will ever use this service again nor recommend it to a friend. For the price I paid, I am genuinely sad about the outcome.

Tani kept me up to date all along through the project. She was helpful and very prompt to reply if I had any questions. I received my binders and am finding the information fascinating. It is nice to have confirmed some of the things I knew, and interesting to find some of the things I thought I knew were not as I had thought. It got me excited to continue my research with Legacy Tree to go back even further into my family lines.

The communication throughout and willingness to begin with my working theories made for a pleasant experience.

The staff was very helpful, informative and caring. My contact person, Sheri Bennett was excellent, professional, knowledgeable and always accessible for my inquiries.
I am extremely pleased with their services and work product.
Highly recommend!!

The helpfulness and enthusiasm of the people! They're a great team to work with and do amazing work! I discovered local connections that I wasn't aware of, and that I am partly Welsh! Such a meaningful thing to do that I wish I'd now done before. Now I want more!

I was adopted at birth and had no names of my biological parents. I reached out to Legacy Tree for assistance and they made the proper recommendation of taking DNA tests and not only did I find some biological relatives... I found out who my biological parents were and actually had the opportunity of meeting up with my biological mother and other relatives. I received all of these results within about a month and half of dealing with my project manager from legacy tree. Legacy Tree has the experience to help anyone achieve their goals and I doubt I would have had the type of success with my personal genealogy goals without the assistance and expertise of Legacy Tree. This was truly an unforgettable experience and a lifelong dream that came true for me.

I wish I would have found and read the reviews for this company before I hired them. I’m now concerned for my project being verified and done by professionals, that I thought was this company. For over a year I’ve been requesting/emailing asking for the the status of my family Lineage project. My project started March 2022, I already had done a lot of my own research that I backed up by information I got from my 94 yr mom before she passed away. I hired this company to verify what I found from my mothers family because my research showed our family came to America in 1600’s. I want to leave my children verified and documented family history before I pass away. It’s now August 2023, I’ve been in touch with the person in charge of my project, to only get the same excuse, New York State archives department hasn’t sent them my family genealogy documents. Of course they have been paid so it may not be a priority for them anymore. I’m worried that my project may not verify my family history along with a professional binder showing my family history after reading others reviews here and other review sites.

I wanted to find where my paternal great-great-grandfather came from in Germany, etc. Per Amanda, Client Solutions Specialist, this company helps clients discover their German origins. Their professionals are familiar with border changes, name misspellings, tracking down the city or town of origin of German ancestors.
My Project Manager, Lori, advised me Shelbie would be my assigned researcher.
It appears that Shelbie has the least amount of time and experience with this company. The binder I received was a huge disappointment and waste of money ($3000.00). There was information in the binder that I had already seen on Ancestry. It was repetitive also. I basically learned nothing new. I feel I was mislead by this company's objective. It was mentioned numerous times that for more money they would continue researching. I feel that all they are interested in is the money and not the quality of their work for the client.
Also, the letter Lori sent me along with the binder had my great-great-grandfather's name misspelled and two pages from the Documents tab were hard or impossible to read.
I sent an email to Lori and cc Amanda. Within a couple of days I get a reply sorry for the typo that slipped through and that a revised letter along with darkened versions of Documents 1 and 3 will be sent.
I'm back to square one due to inadequate research. I will not be spending any more money on this company and do NOT recommend Legacy Tree Genealogists.

UPDATE: The company reached out to me and are going to help me out on this project. I will change my rating upon completion. Thank you.

I chose Legacy Tree to help my 99 year old mother trace her biological parents. Without a father’s name on her birth certificate and a very common mother’s name, we knew this was probably hopeless, but this was our last chance. The waiting was painful, but we received regular updates and progress reports and could not have dreamt that by the end of the process we would know the names of both parents and contact details for living relatives.
This has probably been the most exciting discovery of my life and I have loved taking Mum to visit her father’s grave and to establish contact with a direct cousin of hers. All this, six months before her 100th birthday. What a birthday present!

The team and my researcher (Carolyn and Sarah), communicated in a timely manner and explained their search strategies and the data as we went along. I could always ask questions and they guided me in doing some of the research myself as most of the archive searches had to be carried out in German. This saved me money and I learned a lot during the process.
I got all the data I needed to make the link with information from my cousin and against the odds managed to identify my biological father. I am so relieved I know where I come from.

I would advise caution about this firm. They promise much and deliver little for the money.
I write in support of my relative who posted about her search for family history in Italy for her mother. It is a basic fact that birth, marriage and death certificates of a certain period in Italy are not available online. They can only be obtained by in person search at the local authority/community. Surely any genealogical research site would know this? Not rocket science. Instead it took a brief visit by one of us to the local registry Dept in Tuscany who gave us contact details. A day later we began to get results. We now have details of our family tree dating back to mid 1850s. RESULT! At no cost even for the certificates.

Instead this company wasted a huge amount of money barking up the wrong tree and then advising us that the research was difficult. They are defending the indefensible. If they had a conscience they would be returning most of the thousands of US dollars they charged for inadequate research. Instead they have offered a refund of 4 hours out of an alleged 25 hours spent on unproductive research. Also, you pay for admin chats, not just proper research.

I would not go anywhere near this company for family history until they learn some of the basics of family history research in Europe. A costly mistake for my family.

I contacted Legacy Tree (LT) in May 2022 with the objective of preparing a present for my mother's birthday. Customer service appeared convincing and open to shape the research to my requests (quite specific, as my mother's wish was to be part of the research process. I made this request explicit to LT), so I purchased during the same month a Basic25 (25 hours of research work) project for USD 2950. My project was eventually finalized in February 2023 (9 months later) and my mother was handed over a report from which emerged a significant number of methodological flaws in the research process (see description below). Quite predictably, for the reasons detailed further in this post, the project was unable to identify the slightest information about my family's ancestors, for which LT argued that this was due to the uniqueness of every project, some of which are particularly complex (like mine). LT empathized with mine and my mother’s frustration at the lack of conclusive results and suggested we look at the process positively: should we consider pursuing the journey, at least we would now know where NOT to look and which unexplored thread to follow. According to the project report, with all my money and using up all 25 h, the researcher had essentially gone through a whole lot of online search engines, all of which without exception were unable to locate even my closest’ of ancestor’s trace. This would be a plausible approach, if I hadn’t spent (together with another relative) a good month at the beginning of the project feeding LT with every bit of picture or family document I could dig out and gather (at times for a fee through formal institutional processes), at least two of which represented pretty strong leads a good researcher would have jumped on right away. There were no traces in the project report of any of these threads having been used at all in the process. To my question about it I was provided two different, but complementary answers: i) the project I had purchased did not include sufficient hours to perform the kind of research that would have been required, if my threads were to be followed. Going down that line would allegedly used up all my credit in one or two single steps with even less chances of finding any useful information; ii) the project was so complex that it involved checking scanned records, page by page (very difficult indeed, and even more so in another language than English… at this point I have to add that LT claimed that they had lots of native speakers in their team). What is more, this search needed to happen in two different locations, because, according to the information I had provided, there was a doubt about the true place of birth of the ancestors we were trying to locate. This step was allegedly necessary to make sure to leave no stone unturned and it should not be underestimated. Not convinced by these arguments and prompted by a glaring factual mistake in the report that suggested methodological flaws that could have been easily avoided through a simple google search, I took up to google myself, identified the email address of the local authorities of the supposed place of birth of my closest ancestor and asked my mother to submit a request to these authorities to locate all existing records (birth and marriage certificates in our case) of 3 specific persons we wanted to locate in the first place. Which she did (in about 30 min). A complete reply with all the requested certificates was received within a matter of days (weekend included), which revealed that: i) Birth, marriage and death information does not existing in principle online in the particular country we were working on. It could only be collected from a formal local authority. One would have expected expert genealogists, such as LT to know this basic fact before spending 25h on online search engines; ii) The two locations LT was looking at for my ancestors were under one and the same administrative jurisdiction in the concerned years. There was therefore no need to go through archives in two different locations. Another detail one would expect experienced researchers in that particular country to know before using up time and money inefficiently; iii) The certificates we obtained contain a whole wealth of very useful information the researcher could have used to properly complete my project. Missing out on this very first crucial and yet simple step, LT and its inefficient research methodology compromised the entirety of my project. The factual feedback, similar to the above, provided to LT, was met explanations about how human error occurs. Recognizing to have used “some" research time inefficiently, LT did offer to reimburse me the equivalent of 4 hours. Needless to say that I find this offer offensive.

Legacy Tree provided to me a professional, valuable and courteous service which was superb. I am so grateful to them for tracing my adopted father’s birth parents from over 80 years ago. I can’t describe how much this means to me when for so long I didn’t know I had any blood relatives on my Dad’s side. I can’t praise Legacy Tree highly enough. The project manager was always on hand to provide updates and answer queries and I am so grateful for the personal contact I had with her throughout.

Legacy Tree Review
I have completed the first of two phases for my project. I am floored with the phenomenal quality of the report. The level of investigative effort is amazing. I absolutely recommend legacy tree and the have my highest praise

I have never seen anything so meticulously researched, and so well put together

BEWARE Legacy Tree offers no- zip- zero guarantee on what they might find, or not, in their research. I paid $3,000 for the starter engagement and gave them the names of my great grandparents and where they were born, Scotland and Ireland.

They took the $3,000, made we wait 6 months and found no additional ancestors or information. They are completely unapologetic about the results. They state that the fee is for ‘hours not results’.

Deborah Reitz

The Genelogist were great
No was to much trouble for them
I wanted them to help me with a family tree i had just hit a brick wall no matter how much i research for my family i just couldnt find them . When i got in touch with legacytree geneologist explain what i want i sent the documents i had they kept me informed all the time and after time i got my binder with everything i need. Fantastic service thankyou
Susan Moore