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Ancestry.co.uk free trial - anyone done it?
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[Deleted User]
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Just wondering if anyone has tried the 14 day free trial on ancestry.co.uk?
I'm always dubious about any type of free trial - there must be a catch somewhere! - but this one says no money will be taken and you can cancel before the 14 day period expires.
Can you access all the archives whilst on the trial? And is it easy to cancel before you get charged?
I'm always dubious about any type of free trial - there must be a catch somewhere! - but this one says no money will be taken and you can cancel before the 14 day period expires.
Can you access all the archives whilst on the trial? And is it easy to cancel before you get charged?
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They rely on people forgetting. Or hooking them of the genealogy hobby so they don't mind paying!
That said I am a member - because they offered the access to te census returns I needed to begin sorting out the different branches of my family. I also quite like how their tree software works. Beware of copying from other people's trees as you can ONLY be certain if you have done the research yourself.
There are other sites - Find my past for instance who have quite a good coverage for parish records. They also have the 1911 census there (Ancestry don't have this yet).
Then there are free sites like Free BMD - no payment required for all birth/marriage/death records for from 1837. I believe they also have the 1881 census there, free for searching.
Family Search run by the latter day saints is another good free site to begin researching parish records pre-1837.
Edit to say: what do you want to achieve in your 14 days? If its to "do" your entire family tree then its not long enough - some people take decades to do that! But if its just to determine a few facts about a handful of great grandparents then it's fine.
The key to starting is begin with yourself and what you know and work back from there. I hope you enjoy it.
Thanks. I know virtually nothing about my family past my grandparents, so I've just emailed my father asking for some details to make searching a bit easier.
Even after a quick half hour search I can see that this is something you could get very easily hooked on. Knowing my luck I'll come from a long line of dodgy characters :eek:
You might like to try out the pay as you go option which is £7 for 12 searches in 14 days.
It's a small amount to give you a taste of what it will give you. Also a lot of libraries allow you to use it for free.
There are lots of online programmes that help you with this.
But I haven't found any one satisfactory way of displaying your entire tree because the sheer amount of people and connections they contain.
I have heard people print out theirs on A4 sheets and stick them all together. They end up covering huge amounts of floor/wall space.
My tree has about 1,000 names on it for instance. And mine is still very incomplete.
You can display a scaled down version with just grandparents and no siblings in any generation. You will have 16 great grandparents for example and 32 great greats and so on as it doubles each time you go back.
I gave up!!!
Yep, it does get hard and I have branches that have been so hard I've left them for a time when I will have the time to physically go to the place to search records in libraries. Namely my Irish ancestors! A trip to Dublin beckons at some point. I have only gone as far back as the 1850's with them so far.
Fortunately other branches seemed to live in the same area of the UK for decades, and in some cases can be found in roughly the same place for two hundred years or more - mostly as agricultural labourers.
Each time they add new records it opens up another wormhole that you just have to go down.
The one thing that did annoy me a lot though is that when you cancel, there are about four or five screens you have to navigate through before you get to the end of the process. The first time I tried to cancel, I didn't realize that when I'd pressed 'cancel my subscription' on one page, I'd have to go through it several more times before it did actually cancel it! I ended up getting charged for a month's use of the site because I thought I'd cancelled it but hadn't (I didn't think of contacting the site to complain as someone said above - I probably should have!)
I just started plotting mine out using http://www.geni.com/home
It's free and very easy to use.