Is anyone else having a problem with broken Ancestry links?

Question

In my profiles, I fully cite sources then link as appropriate to that source in Ancestry, Family Search, and Newspapers.com for those that have them.  As of yesterday links to resources such as Census images return a broken Ancestry link.  It appears Wikitree prepends the URL with "https://www.ancestry.com/mrd?key=U"

This generates a 500 error in Ancestry.  Newspapers.com work fine.  Family Search links also still work.

This happens when I try to examine a record from a Chrome browser.

Please try the "Sources" section in the profile for Rena (Wilson) Mitchell (Wilson-98552) as an example.

Thanks for your help.

Comments

Hi Jim. This is a problem that recurs for a few people from time to time. It is not well understood. See for example this previous G2G question and the links it contains.

Try clearing cookies and if necessary browser cache.

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Yes!  Clearing Ancestry cookies did it for me.  Looks like Wikitree uses an affiliate link and then Ancestry errors out when cookies get too big or dinged.  Thank you.

Answer 1

I get it all the time, and just remove it so the page loads correctly.  Annoying, but certainly not more so than my inability to remember that source links do not open in a new tab automatically.

Comments

Clearing Ancestry cookies fixed it for me.  You can clear them in the Chrome Browser Privacy and Security settings.

Chrome 3 Dot menu -> More tools -> Clear browsing data

Close their popup.

Then go into "Cookies and other site data"

Then go into "See all site data permissions"

Find Ancestry in the list and get rid of their cookies.

Open Ancestry in a browser tab and login.

Links should then work again.  This might sound a little tinfoil, but they sure make it hard to delete individual cookies....

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I should be clearing out all that browser junk periodically anyway for performance/security reasons.

Answer 2

Someone just complained about broken Ancestry/RootsWeb links on a html list I follow. They said the links on this site, WikiTree,  that were in the source sections were broken. 

This is a big problem. I adopted GenWeb sites and there were many links to RootsWeb pages. Even using the WayBack, I was unable to find most of the pages. I was able to find some of them using the WayBack Machine. It breaks my heart. 

I had a site on RootsWeb and pulled it down after the big change over. There was a huge glitch after that which lost some sites completely and others lost a page or two. RootsWeb sites (Ancestry)  were down for a long time. I believe a lot of it is just gone.

So profiles that have a lot of RootsWeb links in the source section probably need to be checked.

Sheri