OK the problem is worse than I thought and I've decided I'm not going to live with it. I've been a member of Ancestry for 16 years and I pay them a lot of money for a service that's now not working for me. It's not just the LifeStory that's messed up. I could live without that but due to Ancestry's failure to include Tiverton, Devon in their locations, I can't search on any of my people that have Tiverton as a location for their events. For example, I just looked at one that I have entered the births, census returns & marriage for Tiverton, Devon (which is reflected accurately in the facts) and tried to search further but the search defaults to Tiverton, Cheshire.
This might seem like a minor problem affecting one small place but it isn't. Tiverton, Devon is a significant town in Devon (pop 20,000) and also an official registration district of BMD for a wider area. Tiverton, Cheshire is tiny village (pop 300) so the default to it is utterly ridiculous.
It gets worse... The old name for Devon is Devonshire so it comes up a lot in records but instead of defaulting to Devon, England (pop 200,000) Ancestry defaults to Devonshire, Bermuda (pop 7,000). I am not going to accept this. Ancestry needs to do its homework on English place names and their significance. I've filed another query with them and I'll keep you updated on their response.
Update: 12 hours later and I've just received a generic reply telling me to fill in the locations properly. I've responded that I know how to do that and I want them to pass my complaint up the chain to people with the power to deal with it.
