free & easy

Ancestry.com for free?

Yes—there is a way! For one thing, you can sign up for a free 14-day trial, perfect if you’ve got two weeks to do research. Just don’t forget to cancel your subscription before your trial is over. (Otherwise, your card will be charged.)

But even outside of a free trial, the savvy researcher can take advantage of Ancestry.com without having a paid subscription. Check out these seven free features of Ancestry.com (and its sister sites).

1 THE CARD CATALOG

Before you subscribe, you’ll want to make sure Ancestry.com has records relevant to your research. You can do that using Ancestry.com’s Card Catalog <www.ancestry.com/search/collections/catalog>. Like the paper-and-ink library card catalogs of old, this database lists all the record collections in Ancestry.com’s arsenal. You can search by keyword or use filters to find collections that might contain your ancestor.

Finding your way to the Card Catalog (and into Ancestry.com, in general) without a trial subscription can be a challenge. Ancestry.com’s home page often changes—sometimes to reflect a sale on subscriptions or DNA, sometimes because one of the site’s “cookies” flags that your IP address has visited before—making it difficult to find the main menu. You should use the direct link in the previous paragraph if possible.

If the word Genealogy is in the site’s main menu, click on it to access that part of the site (including the subscriber.