Genealogy Chat

I just wanted to warn other people who were considering using this "Free Trial" to be very wary. Personally I felt the £85 annual fee was very steep for the information available on the site and therefore decided immediately that I wished to cancel bfore I had to pay a subscription. However Ancestry.com make cancelling as difficult as possible: -If you try to cancel by e-mail you receive no confirmation by return as promised -To cancel by phone you have to ring the US during THEIR office hours -The website has the wrong GMT times published on it. -Nobody answers the "cancellation extension" anyway After 3 e-mails, and having spent 40 minutes "in a queue" on a call to the US, I rang their sales department, who answered within 1 ring. They now claim to have cancelled my membership, but I don't trust them and have put a block on my credit card. Through various message boards I have now been contacted by other people who had exactly the same problems, so I just wanted to warn people to PROCEED WITH CAUTION!

I have to say that this is an extremely useful site - I took out a quarter's subscription, as I couldn't afford a full year, and renewed it once. I have now had to let it lapse, as I think I've extracted all the information I need for 1891, but as soon as more counties are covered for the 1871 census I will again subscribe. You only have to see the long requests for lookups where people offer these, to realise that the information from this site is invaluable. Perhaps if more people paid, and less tried to get the information for free, the subscription to everyone would be cheaper. I would also like to add that, when I cancelled my subscription, I did it by email and received an immediate response. That was presumably because I sent them all the information they requested. Jan

so did I.

Hi Lisa I too have found Ancestry to be invaluable in my research. I have also used their free trials and have always managed to cancel with ease. Sam

I have found it good until about 2 days ago when it became so slow it is unusable. See my thread (no578277). This has made me question whether or not I will subscribe after my free bit!! Gerry

I, too took the 14 day trial. I found the site very slow and downloads took ages. I decided to cancel. I hadn't received any e mail telling me what to do about it. I went back to the page I used to subscribe and using the contact us button sent them an e mail to cancel. Within an hour I received a confirmation e mail that it was done and no money would be taken. This was fine. But I did notice that if I had taken the subscription up after the "free" trial it would have started from day 1, so in effect there isn't a free trial.