Your Ancestry subscription has not only included your online family tree, but also all of the records that you found and attached to that tree. ItвЂ™s easy to cringe at the thought of paying for genealogy website subscriptions we arenвЂ™t currently using.Д«ut the idea of losing all our progress on those web sites if we let our subscription lapse is worse. Can I drop my membership and still retain my trees? I plan to get my membership back at a later day. I love to work on my genealogy but lately have not had time. вЂњI have been a member of for a long time and have worked on several trees. She wrote to me, concerned about what will happen to all her hard work on that Ancestry tree: This is what happened to Genealogy Gems reader Beverly. However, it is very common for the busyness of life to call them away from their genealogy research for a while. Along the way, they attach records to each ancestor as evidence of what theyвЂ™ve learned.ДЄll of this adds up to a unique family tree that is precious to your family. Then they sift through AncestryвЂ™s billions of historical records and add hundreds or even thousands of new names, dates, relationships and other facts to their family trees. They build their family tree on the web site, adding details about their relatives. Many people start researching their genealogy with an Ancestry subscription. ( Return.What Happens if Your Ancestry Subscription Expires *Correction, April 23, 2015: This article originally misstated that Carroll College is in Wyoming. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate.В Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. вЂњI was hoping they would come to me in a dream, as we read in stories.вЂќ вЂњI wish I could come up with more concrete examples,вЂќ she said, pausing. She was alarmed by the degree to which the memories had already started to fade. My grandmother, an avid Wikipedian with exceptional recall, told me that sheвЂ™d tried to remember important MyFamily posts to tell me about for this article. Tom the Tomato eventually withered up and died, and my grandfather passed away a year or two later. The tragedy is that without a written record, memory is transient-and lost forever to the dead.

(The company did eventually provide an unattributed statement expressing regret for вЂњany confusion or disappointmentвЂќ due to the fact that it вЂњultimately determined it wasnвЂ™t feasible to return the discussion data,вЂќ and claiming that it worked with some customers to export the data with a third-party contractor, though a representative declined to connect me with a customer whose discussions had been successfully recovered in such a way.) Ancestry wonвЂ™t share even basic information about the shutdown-representatives declined to tell me how many users the site had when the closure was announced, whose decision it was not to export the data, or even whether our family history is in fact gone forever or just languishing on some unplugged server. Moreover, why not make an effort to warn users? My best guess is that Ancestry intended to export the data properly, hit a technical snag, and made the cynical decision to not follow through, in the hopes that nobody would call the company out on it.Д«ut weвЂ™ll probably never know.

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