Ancestry.co.uk

What we liked Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Ancestry.co.uk is that it does a lot of the laborious research for you. While you’re building your tree on the site and adding relatives, the ‘Ancestry Hints’ search engine quietly scours its collection of records and data in the background looking for related content. You can attach any relevant files it finds and ignore the rest.

The site accepts GEDCOM files (GEnealogical Data COMmunication – the plain-text file format used by most family tree sites and software) so if you’ve already started researching your family elsewhere, you can simply import the file and continue where you left off.

Each person in your tree has a profile page to which you can add useful information and photos, and attach events to a timeline. You can also manually search for historical records that might be linked to that individual. Resources include birth, marriage and death indexes and all the available censuses for England and Wales.

How it can be improved
Searching for records is free, but viewing them is quite pricey. A batch of 12 record views will set you back £6.95 (valid for 14 days), while UK membership – unlimited access to over 580 million searchable names – is priced at £9.95 per month or £79.99 annually. World membership, which lets you search Ancestry.co.uk’s entire database of over five billion names, costs £24.95 for one month or £199.95 annually.

There is a free trial but to sign up for it you need to enter your credit card details. If you forget to cancel this within 14 days, you’ll be billed for the most expensive membership. This also automatically renews every year so it could get very costly.

Our verdict
Ancestry.co.uk is wonderfully-presented and very easy to use. Building a complex family tree is surprisingly straightforward, but the billing options could be cheaper or at least more flexible.

Reviewed: Issue 167 (9 August to 22 July 2007)