www.itowler.com - Ian's Home on the web

This year I will not be renewing my Ancestry.com membership.  Partly because of the Expense, but mostly because I am not using it enough to justify the cost of roughly 160.00 (or a little more than 13.00 a month).  I currently have a backlog of items to get done on my own Familytree site, and I have a toddler in the house, so extra time for using Ancestry.com is not likely.

As I mentioned in a blog post earlier this year, when I got started in genealogy, I was anxious to add people to the tree as fast as I could, and as such did not take the time to document where I got the records from.  On top of the no documentation issue is the issue of poor documentation, which is how a lot of my census records are entered.  The combination of these 2 issues mean that I have a lot of cleaning up to do in my own tree, and I really should be addressing these issues now, before the tree grows larger.

It is my understanding (and Hope) that the tree and records that I have attached to individuals on my Ancestry.com tree (although that is not my "main" or working tree) will remain, I just will not have access to the records themselves.  If/when I decide that I want to renew my subscription, when I do, access to the records will be restored, and everything will be fine.  Don't get me wrong, I really do value the service that Ancestry.com provides, and I was a subscriber for 2-3 consecutive years.  I know that there are some people that feel that Ancestry.com should not be able to charge for providing access to public records, but they really do provide more than that.  Let me be clear, I have no hard feelings towards ancestry.com and I will likely renew my subscription in the coming years, just not this year.

At the end of the day it comes down to saving a few bucks.  I currently have enough "work" to do on the data that I have collected thus far in order to clean it up and make it more consistent, and that should keep me busy for at least a year, perhaps more.  I will be interested to see once my subscription ends, if I find myself "needing" ancestry.com more than I thought I would.  

Time will tell.