I have just attempted to get onto the Ancestry site which those without subscriptions have always been allowed to use free of charge and found that all it now does it flash up the price list and ask for a subscription.

Does anyone know if it is just a glitch today? Or have they now closed it to those without subscriptions? I have used that site for years and never had this happen before. I have never had a subscription to it because my local library has one to it which enables me to check things further if I need to go further with things. It will, however, be a real shame if they have changed the criteria and made it only accessible to fee payers.

I passed the Forest of Dean yesterday on a motorway in a colleague's car and felt sad that I had to pass it by without being able to visit it!

Hi,
I've not been on it for a few days, but I've just opened it up and all seems normal to me. Like you I'm not a subscriber altho I've made use of their various free weekends etc several times so am probably on their black list !

I presume, can't remember for sure, my pc is setup and cookied etc so I don't have to log in passwords et al, as soon as I opened the site it displayed normally including listing and giving access to my various family trees, and appears to run free searches etc as normal. Also as normal it only supplies full results to the normally free data, eg from FreeBMD, 1881 Census, etc, presume thats what you've been getting too, it won't let me see Census images etc.

I've been having the usual emails newsletters, none mentioned any changes.
Are you using the same pc/laptop etc as usual ?.
You havent run any "clean up" software etc that might have closed-off the automatic links etc ?.

Suggest in the good ol'fashioned way, you switch off and on then try again.

Good Luck !

Thanks for this, I have just been back on it since I posted the message and all seems back to normal. I wonder if they had just been doing something to their site?! Panic over!