This was supposed to be a product review of the Ancestry Match Downloader chrome extension.
Unfortunately it’s not downloading matches currently. Judging by the reviews and support comments, it stopped working sometime in January 2020.
“worked fine on first try about 3 weeks ago but now no longer functions. Wont scan or anything.”
Jan 2020
“The extension was working a week ago, but this week it stopped working.”
Jan 2020
A Basic Match Count
The application successfully processes the first step, which is a limited count of your matches. The instructions state clearly that the extension limits the download of matches to 20 CM. This doesn’t suit my needs for reasons that will be clear from this screen grab from the application in action:
Yes, I have 149 matches at this range. In contrast, the instructions say that a typical Ancestry user will have up to 10,000 matches in this range.
Ancestry Match Downloader Error
Unfortunately, the next step fails to download any matches.
A Promising Set Of Features
I’m disappointed this is not working because the feature list includes downloading shared matches (also referred to ICW matches). The instructions gives some time estimates to download shared matches based on how many matches you’re working with (at 20CM+):
- 2,500 matches – 30 minutes
- 4,000 matches – 2 hours
- 6,000 matches – 3 to 4 hours
That’s not too dissimilar from what I remember of the now defunct AncestryDNA Helper chrome extension.
3 thoughts on “Ancestry Match Downloader Status”