Ancestry.com is the best-known subscription genealogy website on the internet. It’s been around for more than two decades and is usually the first place beginning genealogists think of going when they get to the point in their genealogy where they’re deep enough into it to want to pay to access the best records. The site has millions of subscribers worldwide, with new ones jumping on board all the time. In a limited market like genealogy, Ancestry.com is undoubtedly the king. The question is, is Ancestry.com worth the price of admission?
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One of the biggest complaints about Ancestry.com is its price. Let’s face it, it’s expensive. While there are free family tree building features, and periods of time each year when certain record collections are free to anyone to access, you’ve got to pay to obtain access to most of the records most of the time. After all, what good is it to build your family tree for free on their site if you can’t expand or enrich it by accessing their records? Many of the records on Ancestry.com are not available to the public anywhere else, while others are available, but require travel to sometimes distant locations to access them.
Being quite literally an all-purpose genealogy research destination, Ancestry.com knows it is the best game in town, and it charges for that premium genealogy research experience. A basic monthly membership that allows you access to American records and nothing else will cost you around $25 a month. If you want access to Ancestry.com’s entire worldwide collection of genealogy records, that costs nearly $450 annually. There are price tiers lower than that, with lesser access to records, and with options of paying monthly, twice yearly, or annually. This offers more convenience for those who want to use the site, but it is still a substantial chunk of change to most households.
That being said, Ancestry.com is the best, most comprehensive, well-stocked genealogy research website on the internet. There is no doubt about that. Any genealogist who is serious about their genealogy, who enjoys (or requires) the convenience of doing deep records research from their house, and wants to interact with other genealogists who are researching their same lines, a subscription to Ancestry.com is practically a must.
When you add in their DNA testing service that matches you with your genetic matches, and its discounts on the subscription prices of other genealogy research websites (and the ability to log into them from Ancestry.com, giving you all of your online research needs in one convenient location), there is little doubt that it is challenging to do your genealogy in this day and age without Ancestry.com. They know it and charge accordingly.
If you consider all that Ancestry.com has to offer, the price point is really its only downside. There are several different subscription tiers at different prices and several different payment plans for your needs. They really do try to make the price as accessible to everyone who wants and needs this service as they are able. You can also sign up for a free fourteen-day trial, just to discover if Ancestry.com is for you. If you don’t have it in your budget to buy your own subscription right now, most public libraries have subscriptions that they make available for their patrons to use for free. The only downside of that is having to go to the library to use it. Whatever way you choose, there should be a method of you accessing Ancestry.com that works for you. It is well worth it to do so.
Is Ancestry.com worth the money for your genealogy research? Without a doubt. It’s worth the price of admission just for access to the US Federal Census alone. In the past, you either had to go to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. to access the US Federal Census or go to a genealogy library that had it on microfilm. At a library, you had to look up your ancestors in an index book for the census you wanted to search, then find the microfilm roll that corresponded to their number in the index, then put the microfilm in the reading machine and scroll through it until you found your ancestor. You might miss your ancestor and need to scroll through the roll more than once to find them. The index book might not even have them listed, and you would end up searching an entire census to see if they are there, just in case the index missed them (which it sometimes did).
Ancestry.com made all that so much simpler with its ability to search the census by name, age, date of birth, place born, the place lived at the time the census was taken, and even by names of other relatives in the household. You can search a name phonetically, by alternate spellings, and even by looking for other people who lived with or near them. You can do all this from your computer in a fraction of the time traditional census searches used to take. Because the census is such an important American genealogy tool, any genealogist who is even semi-serious about the pastime needs an Ancestry.com account.
The census is only the tip of the iceberg as far as what Ancestry.com has to offer. It has records of all types from all over the world. Birth, death, and marriage records are on there (sometimes with scans of the actual document), wills and probate records are there, military records are there, public directories, high school yearbooks, immigration, passport, Social Security, draft card, cemetery, church, school, and baptism/christening records are all there. Publicly submitted family trees are there (and usually searchable unless the submitter made them private). DNA testing is available, with the ability to connect with distant relatives and determine who you have in common on your family tree. Old newspaper records are there in a limited capacity. Old photographs are there.
When it comes to online genealogy research, Ancestry.com really does have it all. You should definitely have a subscription. It is well worth the money.