Home Access to Ancestry Library Edition is Gone ... Now What?

During the great shutdown of 2020 - 2021, Ancestry.com extended access to Ancestry Library Edition and all over the nation, librarians rejoiced! 

Ancestry.com decided in late Spring 2020 to allow library cardholders at institutions with subscriptions to Ancestry Library Edition through the ProQuest vendor to provide ALE to our customers from their home or office. One did not have to be inside a library building with a subscription to ALE  - which made sense, of course, because what Library was going to pay for inside-our-buildings-only access to ALE when our customers could-not-get-inside-our-buildings to access the ALE database? None. Thus,  Ancestry.com opened access through Library websites to ALE for library cardholders at home or working from home as long as the customer had a valid library card and the proper password. It was a generous - but also a self-serving economic - decision on Ancestry.com's part.  It was a smart move.

It was a highly popular move, too. The number of users and hits of Beaufort County Library cardholders alone got as high as quadruple the usual counts - and yes, I am sure that some folks took the plunge and purchased a home subscription to Ancestry.com during the shutdown and now that we are back to the "inside-the-Library-building-on-Library-machines" mode, some more may also pay money for a personal subscription to Ancestry.com.

However, Ancestry.com says "No more!" Now what? Here's my "down & dirty" synopsis of what you can do: 

1. Library customers will continue to have access to the Ancestry Library Edition database inside our buildings on library equipment. Unfortunately, you will not be able to use your own devices to get into ALE. 

2. Some features will remain available on the open web. Nancy Hendrickson wrote about them in her article "Ancestry for Free: 7 Ways to Use It with No Subscription" in the January/February 2021 Family Tree Magazine . 

    a. Free Ancestry.com card catalog

    b. View record previews -  though this has definite limitations. Ancestry.com shows results if there is free access to the collection but only a sample of matching records if access to the collection is behind a paywall. Note: There are a lot of content behind Ancestry.com's paywall.  A potential work-around: Try FamilySearch.org to see if it hosts the same or a quite similar collection that might also include the records you seek. You will have to register for a free account, but it only costs you the time it takes to enter some personal data.

    c. Peek at public member trees - because that shaky leaf won't fall oftentimes without a personal subscription to Ancestry.com. Contact information for creators of member trees is definitely hidden behind the paywall. 

    d. Ancestry Academy's how-to videos. My favorites are the "5 Minute Finds," "a library of quick-and-easy videos on important genealogy topics" and the 12 videos on the Reconstruction Era, since we have the Reconstruction Era National Park right here in Beaufort County.

    e. Watch Ancestry.com on YouTube. There are hundreds of short - and not so short - videos posted in the past 12 years about how to do family history and tales of family history. 

    f. Purchase an AncestryDNA test. Purchase in this case, means you pay money for the test, but you don't have to have an Ancestry.com subscription to buy an AncestryDNA test kit. There are, of course, plenty of competitors who will sell you an DNA testing kit and some of us have serious concerns about the process and potential consequences. But who's quibbling? 

    g. Search free records on Ancestry.com's sister websites. Ancestry.com has been gobbling up competitors for quite some time. It owns the Find-A-Grave and RootsWeb websites which are free; and Fold3, Newspapers.com, and Archives.com which require a paid subscription. 

Hendrickson goes into much greater detail than I. I encourage you to read her article - which should be on the open web for work-arounds.