FAMILY HISTORY on a budget
While researching your family history can be fun, it can also be an expensive business at times. It’s a massive benefit to remote researchers that so many resources have now been digitised and made available online, but some of the records are only available on subscription websites. In addition, travel can be prohibitively expensive if you need to visit far-flung archives and repositories, and there’s always the risk that they don’t even hold the correct document to break down your brick wall.
However, with a little care and planning, and a heads-up on alternative resources, you don’t have to break the bank…
TRIAL PERIODS AND FREE ACCESS
The largest subscription websites for genealogical records, Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk) and Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk), allow you to sign up for a free account to access some basic background resources. This includes the ability to build family trees, so you may not need to buy dedicated family tree software.
Ancestry and Findmypast also allow you to sign up for a free introductory two-week trial period, using a credit or debit card, after which they will ‘auto-renew’ and deduct a payment for a full subscription. However, at present, if you immediately cancel the subscription after signing up, you will still retain
