Signing up and Starting the Search

Signing up with Ancestry is easy. All you need to put in is your name and email address to create an account. You will, however, need to put in billing information to be able to use Ancestry’s services–even the 14-day free trial. A web browser is definitely the most convenient way to experience Ancestry’s intuitive interface; but if you’re on a tablet or smartphone, the Ancestry mobile app is easier to use and still allows you access to your full account.

After signing up, you can browse through and get results from Ancestry’s records, regardless of how much starting information you have. With as little as your last name to go on, a fruitful search for family history can begin. Typically, essential and civic documents will be the first to turn up: birth certificates, marriage certificates, voter lists, residential records, and the like. As more facts are accumulated, more interesting sources surface: newspaper articles, school records, church records, and more. Search filters help when chasing down leads, as does Ancestry’s image viewer. Available even to free trial members, the viewer allows you to examine scanned documents; particularly helpful when dealing with photos and handwritten entries.

Building Family Trees with Ancestry

Ancestry’s online family tree builder is a simple but effective tool that aids in adding context to your research. The site provides videos, guides and FAQ pages to help along the process.

To start creating a personal family tree, Ancestry recommends adding your basic information: full name, gender, birthdate and birth location. Facts about your family members are important, too–as many and as far back as you can provide. The site also asks whether a relative is living or deceased, and urges you to note the death date and location in latter cases. All of this is useful, even with missing details and inexact dates; Ancestry compares the given data to its record archives and other subscriber profiles. When it finds matches, the site shows them to you as hints in the form of leaves. Each hint can be reviewed, and it is up to you to confirm a record’s significance or to dismiss it. Confirmed records show up as sources attached to individual relatives along the length of the family tree.

Saving Memories in a Shoebox

For records you want to save but not connect specifically to someone in your family tree, there is the relatively new feature on the site: Shoebox. It comes paired with a separate mobile app of the same name, still powered by Ancestry. This not only allows you to save records for later access, perusal and moving; but also encourages you to add photos and scanned documents from your personal collection. Audio and video files may also be attached to the family tree, as well as stories and anecdotes.

Sharing and Storing Your Findings

You can build and save as many family trees as you like and share them with anyone, even non-subscribers; and can also choose to make family trees public or private. Family tree data can be exported as a GEDCOM (Genealogical Data Communication) file, which can be read across all genealogy software and can be used by third-party services to create related products. It also ensures you access to your genealogical research even after your Ancestry subscription has run out.

Connecting and Collaborating

It is when you start building your first family tree that you start to get an initial understanding of the advantages of Ancestry’s huge community. Sometimes, leaves point to another subscriber’s family tree; and, in turn, connect you to living relatives who may be working toward research goals close to yours. Stories of users finding long-lost relatives are in no short supply with Ancestry.

If you don’t find fellow subscribers with whom you share common ancestors, there are still other opportunities for collaboration. There are message boards where Ancestry’s community members can interact and lend each other support and advice. There is also the World Archives Project, which allows for crowdsourced content to be added directly to Ancestry’s database. You can add your previously non-digitized records and images to the service’s searchable index through this feature, thereby increasing the chances of finding living relatives and potentially aiding in the research of other current and future subscribers.

Ancestry Pricing – Paying for Premium Service

After the 14-day free trial lapses, you can choose from three subscription tiers if you are still interested in Ancestry’s services: the U.S. Discovery Plan, the World Explorer Plan or the World Explorer Plus. All tiers can be paid for monthly or twice yearly.

Subscription Tier1 Month Access6 Months Access
U.S. Discovery Plan
-access to all U.S. records
$19.99$99.00
World Explorer Plan
-access to all U.S. records
-access to all international records
$34.99$149.00
All Access
-access to all U.S. records
-access to all international records
-access to Newspapers.com records
-access to Fold3.com records
-unlimited access to AncestryAcademy
$44.99$199.00

In addition to complete access to all of Ancestry’s records, All Access subscribers are also given permission to use the databases of Newspapers.com and Fold3.com. The former’s archive contains over 100 million pages of past content from over 4,400 newspapers from around the United States and beyond, while the latter is a genealogy website specializing in U.S. military records. World Explorer Plus subscribers also get unlimited access to AncestryAcademy, which offers exclusive, high-quality video courses taught by genealogy experts. Typically, unlimited access to AncestryAcademy costs $11.99 monthly.

More Services

Apart from AncestryAcademy, there are two other services of note that are advertised on the site and are available for a fee: AncestryDNA and AncestryProGenealogists. AncestryDNA, with a one-time fee of $99.00, requires that you to send in a saliva sample. Your genetic markers will then be analyzed using autosomal testing technology and compared to the DNA of others who have previously sent in their samples. The testing spans 26 regions and ethnicities and helps identify your ethnic breakdown; it can even help you make connections with previously unknown living relatives who have also taken the test. Read our full review here.

AncestryProGenealogists, on the other hand, is a way for you hire a vetted expert to help with your research. Ancestry offers free quotes, but prices start steep: $1,900.00 for 20 to 25 hours of research limited to just one ancestor.

What's the Verdict on Ancestry?

A Must Try

Ancestry Review 2020 – Conclusion

Despite strong customer support and a multitude of guidance tools, navigating through Ancestry efficiently can be tough and slow going. Let’s face it: research with great results takes time and painstaking focus. With just two weeks, there’s only so much you can do. The bottomline is that the 14-day free trial period functions as a way to assess not only what Ancestry can do, but also your level of commitment to your research. When it comes to laying in the groundwork and providing all the right tools for the job, Ancestry does it right–for a price. If you’re willing to put in time and money towards a hands-on approach to exploring your roots properly, then a paid subscription to Ancestry will be well worth it.