Ancestry Price Hike

wakey · Post by **wakey** » 23 Mar 2009 11:50

Under the new Ancestry.co.uk pricing structure, to get the same facilites I have now, which cost me £63 ann. sub., I will now have to pay £107 - 70% increase. Even their cheapest subscription, with less facilites, would be a 33% increase at £83. So,I'm really unhappy about this and I need to decide to rejoin or move, so my question is...
Are there any other sites with similar facilites to Ancestry? What are folks here using?
Many thanks, Pat

ID:3536

gerrynuk · Post by **gerrynuk** » 23 Mar 2009 12:03

I stuck with Ancestry as it has all the census records I need, including UK and USA and lots else besides. In fact, I extended my sub from UK to everything as I have recently found ancestors who emigrated.

However, I can get Family Search and others free at SOG, although this is not as convenient as sitting at home! I have found that for me (and this is highly dependent on what records you need) that other sites just don't cover the geographic areas I need.

Gerry

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 23 Mar 2009 12:21

Pat, I'm in the same situation. I suspect I might move over to pay-as-you-go and monitor the cost via that method for 6 months and or move to Find My Past which is slightly cheaper, and the middle level one includes the old FFHS database as well. I don't need US information at the moment.

rbryce · Post by **rbryce** » 23 Mar 2009 12:26

Our local library have a library licence for Ancestry so I can use it free. Not as convenient as doing it from home but very useful nevertheless. I am sure other libraries must have it too.

Robert

arshawbrown · Post by **arshawbrown** » 23 Mar 2009 13:09

I've used Ancestry for several years now and although I think that the increase is a bit steep I've decided to renew. I believe that it is still good value for money when I consider the amount of info and leads that it has given me.
In fact I have just found a relation that was a convict transported to Van Diemen's Land that was worth several years of membership.[smile]

gerrynuk · Post by **gerrynuk** » 23 Mar 2009 14:04

Another point in favour of Ancestry is the agreement with LMA to digitise all the parish records for London - they should start to come on-line this year.

Gerry

theweedrammer · Post by **theweedrammer** » 23 Mar 2009 16:29

My credit card expired so Ancestry thought I had chosen to leave and offered me the option to sign up again at half price for the next year. They wouldn't have offered me this price otherwise.[confused]

iant1954 · Post by **iant1954** » 17 Apr 2009 11:52

I've cancelled my Ancestry annual UK access, and am letting it run down. When it's done, I'll be signing up to the monthly World membership.

In parallel, I also have annual or monthly memberships to The Genealogist, Find My Past, Family Relatives, The Origins Network, Genes Reunited, and Lost Cousins.

Hilary · Post by **Hilary** » 19 Apr 2009 10:04

I gave up my subscription this year I sometimes miss it but I downloaded a lot of what I want. I think I may get a FMP subscription especially when the 1911 gets added, but at the moment I am seeing what I need and will take up an offer if it is good value for money.
I will try the library if I need access.

Rusty · Post by **Rusty** » 19 Apr 2009 12:57

I don't know if all libraries are the same, but Somerset is going to start charging for computer use.

Margaret

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 19 Apr 2009 14:21

My advice would be to take an Ancestry 'vacation'. As others have said, sometimes they send you a 'come back' offer with a hefty discount.

The trouble with all the services IMHO is the spotty coverage -- as Jane says, FMP has the old FFHS databases, but that does me no good since there is no coverage of the areas I need.

I recently signed up for an Ancestry World sub, hoping to get access to records that would help with my husband's Canadian ancestors, only to find that a lot of the records I was hoping for weren't kept on the national level in the time period I needed.

So it really does help to do one's homework first, find out what records exist in the time and place you need, and then try to find out what online service might have them. Tedious, but worth it in the long run.

For someone just starting out, a program like GenSmarts (despite the glitches that make it not as useful when working with GEDCOM files) can alert you to possible sources of records -- the trial version is available for download or on cover disks for Your Family Tree magazine, so you can try it before you purchase. GenSmarts allows one to make To-Do lists geared to repositories, so it would offer you an itemized list of what missing records might be available at the different online services.

Jan

DaveyB · Post by **DaveyB** » 23 Apr 2009 09:30

I use http://www.TheGenealogist.co.uk They hold full transcripts of English and Welsh Census from 1841 - 1901 and the BMDs. I also found a relative in their Quaker and non-conformist records. Better yet they are a fraction of the cost of Ancestry, I have a credit free all inclusive subscription for £68.95 a year.

Any body considered using them?

davepacey · Post by **davepacey** » 23 Apr 2009 17:23

I had the same subscription for a year (hardly a fraction of the cost though !!) but went back to ancestry, as the search routines on ancestry are far better, as are the images (jpg vs pdf), ancestry also has all the census from 1841 - 1901, thegenealogist do not yet have them all, in particular, 1881.

I let my sub to ancestry run out and was then offered the 20% discount to renew, which I accepted (after trying to knock them down even further, but they refused to budge so after 3 weeks trying I accepted 20%)

Katrina · Post by **Katrina** » 23 Apr 2009 19:08

We have been considering changing from Ancestry to http://www.thegenealogist.co.uk and I noticed that they say that 'subscriptions can only be accessed from one computer. If you try to access from a different computer each time, you may be locked out'. Does this mean that if I set up a subscription from my desktop PC I then couldn't use the site from say our laptop or my daughter's PC when visiting her?

ireneblackburn · Post by **ireneblackburn** » 23 Apr 2009 19:58

Yes that's right. You have to fill in a message form and give a reason for using a different computer before they unlock you - it is like being back in infant school.

Katrina · Post by **Katrina** » 24 Apr 2009 08:03

I have just been reading The Genealogist terms and conditions and it says that they may suspend your service if you change computers more than three times. Not very convenient for me as I might want to access the site at my daughter's house. Perhaps I will think again and stay with Ancestry although I don't like the hefty increase in the subscription charges.

gerrynuk · Post by **gerrynuk** » 24 Apr 2009 09:33

I think you have to keep things in perspective. How does the sub for Ancestry compare with other expenditure on youself and your leisure activities? If family history is your main hobby and if Ancestry is the right web site for the records you need then their charges are still reasonable.

You also need to bear in mind that once you have paid your sub there are no extra charges for using all the records they have - and there are millions of them and expanding all the time.

The new London records are starting to come on line at Ancestry this year. Being able to access the actual images online will, potentially, be a huge saving over the cost of travelling to London and paying to print off individual images from microfilm!

Gerry

Katrina · Post by **Katrina** » 24 Apr 2009 10:56

This is all true Gerry and Ancestry has been a boon for several years. Unfortunately, the Premium subscription could be a bit beyond means and the Essentials package will not have the London records after August as I understand it. This is what prompted me to look into alternatives before the Ancestry sub runs out. I have nearly two months to decide and to be fair, I only have one London ancestor (hubby's side) so it might not be a problem. Thanks, Margaret.

Rusty · Post by **Rusty** » 24 Apr 2009 11:20

Maybe I'm being very cynical, but in my view firms are liable to charge what people will pay, so the more people who shrug and just pay up the more they think they can get away with. Perhaps if more people complained and more withdrew their subscriptions Ancestry might (it's a very big might!) just start to see that they can't get away with such large price hikes.

Margaret

Post by **NickWalker** » 24 Apr 2009 11:58

As someone who was researching family history before the records began to appear on the Internet I think the wealth of information that has appeared and will continue to appear is brilliant and I am happy to pay for this. Back then I could spend hours driving to a record office, painstakingly reading through page after page of records and find nothing! (actually in some ways this was more enjoyable than just looking someone up in an index but I'll ignore that for now!)

The work that Ancestry and others have done has saved so much time and money for me. For example, very soon I'll have access to a lot of London records that I haven't been able to see and would be unlikely to be able to see for years as London is a long distance for me and with children I can't really justify spending a few days in London sat in a record office.

Last year for a few days the LDS Pilot site made all of the registers for Cheshire (one of my main research areas) available for viewing, this was removed soon after I believe due to copyright issues. They weren't indexed but it was brilliant to get the chance to trawl slowly through the records from the comfort of my computer desk without feeling rushed because I need to get back to my car or avoid a rush-hour journey home. Presumably the LDS will eventually be offering this data free of charge but I am happy to spend money to encourage other organisations to make more and more of this material available.

£13 a month for the Premium Ancestry subscription is less than it would cost me in petrol and car parking to drive to all but one record office but means I can use their records whenever I like.

ADC65 · Post by **ADC65** » 24 Apr 2009 14:15

Exactly how much have the subscriptions gone up? Because I certainly paid more than £63 last year, in fact I thought it was £79.99? I'm unsure because at some point I upgraded to worldwide.

DeeJay1 · Post by **DeeJay1** » 28 Apr 2009 11:49

I have a worldwide membership and this has actually reduced in price from £199 to £155. They did try to charge me £199 again but the reminder email had a link to all their packages. When I looked, the worldwide was £155. I queried this and was told that I should pay £155, but there was no was to change it. I therefore had to let the subscription lapse and then reactivate it to get the new rate.

gsmlnx · Post by **gsmlnx** » 28 Apr 2009 15:19

The Genealogist have changed their 3 changes approach , it is documented in their support forums. So you can log in from where ever you wish now.

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 28 Apr 2009 15:27

I agree with Nick for the most part, but I wish that Ancestry and other sites could improve their organization, so that it would be easier to see what materials are available on the site.

The handling of search results could also be improved. In the book industry, when I go to my distributors' websites and search for an author's work, I can usually sort the results by any of the column headings showing in the set of results.

Imagine how much easier it would be if, instead of having Ancestry's 'n-star match' algorithm burying the result you are looking for in the 5th page of a 20-page result, you could quickly sort the results:

1) by port
2) by ship name
3) by date of arrival

etc.

In cases like my husband's family, where in Ancesty's index of the Ellis Island arrivals, the surnames and forenames were badly indexed, I might have been able to 'bubble' the records I wanted closer to the top of the search result list.

As it is now, if I want to do the same thing, I have to scrape the results off and put them in an Excel spreadsheet to re-sort them there. On the (US) National Archives site, as long as the results fall under a certain size, I can download a *.csv for use offline.

Footnote and FamilySearch's Pilot Record Search are much more friendly in how they allow the user to add and exclude search terms and keywords to broaden/narrow the results, and they do not offer misleading suggestions about whether a record is 'likely to be your ancestor', instead noting that there are X many records which match a particular search term.

IMHO Ancestry would be a much better value if they gave up the pretense of helping the user find their ancestor. People would waste less time chasing false leads if Ancestry focused instead on the fact that we are looking at records, and discussed explicitly how the records matched the search terms entered.

If I could tell Ancestry's search engine which term it should consider as most important, and see what changes that made in the results, then it would be worth every penny they ask, and more. But as it is now, I wonder why they are charging me for access to records that the star-matching algorithm mostly hides from me.

Jan

DaveyB · Post by **DaveyB** » 01 May 2009 14:09

The Genealogist does now have 1881 census for quite a few counties. They decided to concentrate on completing other years first, as the 1881 is available free on the LDS site. They are now transcribing all counties and apparently it should be complete within the next year.

The transcripts are also much more detailed than Ancestrys as they have included occupation and street address. You can print off a really nice transcript for your records which can include all family members or all people in the household. Plus they have extra searching tools like the House and Street search and Family Forename search which lets you search with all the first-names of a family

In regards using your subscription on more than one computer, they dont mind that at all as long as you dont use it on more than one computer at the same time. They are also really helpful if you have a problem.

Family Historian User Group