Thursday, October 26, 2006

ABC News video - and free Ancestry tree databases

Did you see the ABC News piece on Good Morning America this morning about Chris Cuomo's family history? It was an excellent story. The story and the video is available at the ABC News web site.

Our blogging friend and genea-hero Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak was the genealogist who showed Cuomo his pedigree chart - but for some reason he called her Megan Blank...what's up with that? It must have been on a script not filled in properly, and not caught before broadcast!

If you go to the second page of the article, there is a link that says you can have 3 days free access to Ancestry.com to start researching your family tree. I tried this, and after signing up with a username, you can access the One World Tree, Ancestry World Tree, Personal Member Tree and the Public Member Tree databases. There is no access to the other Ancestry.com databases, like the census, immigration, vital records, newspapers, etc.

Still, if you have not searched those databases, there is an opportunity to do it for free for three days. This is an excellent marketing strategy by ABC and Ancestry.com, but they need to inform the user that there is more to Ancestry.com than the four user databases, and that it costs money. I imagine they will send an email to signups after the 3 days telling about the wonders of Ancestry.com.

UPDATE (10/27/06): I made an error, and just found out about it.

This is for 3 days for the Ancestry.com US subscription - when you put in the name to search be sure that the "Search" tab is clicked! My bad - sorry for the wrong information. Drat - now I have only two days to deal with it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just to clarify Randy, I signed up for the 3 days of free access and I can access everything. I've been frantically searching vital records and censuses not included at HeritageQuest Online. I think that you can access the member trees anytime for free, if you just register. I had to register to upload my family tree, but I am not a paying member of Ancestry.

I've got 2 days left!