Libraries, governments, genealogical societies, universities, and genealogists have made a wealth of information available online. Ancestry web records makes it easy to find records from many of these places. We summarize information from free web records and provide links to the original sites.

Guiding principles of web records

• Access to web records is free. No one needs to subscribe or register with Ancestry to view these records.
• Web records are attributed to the content publishers.
• They're easily available. Prominent links make it easy to access the source website.

The difference between web records and Ancestry records

Web records are published online by entities other than Ancestry. What you see on Ancestry is an index of basic information (such as names, dates, places and family members) that help in searching. You can often find out much more by visiting the source website.

In some cases, you may need to perform a search on the external website to find the record you're looking for.

Registration

You don't need to have an Ancestry account in order to view web records. They're free and accessible without any registration or sign in needed.

Records included in web records

We look for family history records on free-to-access websites that we think will be of interest to you. Our goal is to provide the best genealogy search experience available.

Only free websites that allow indexing are included in the web records index. Sites can be added to or removed from web records by owner request.

For content publishers and website owners

We follow web standards for restricting crawling (robots.txt files). If a website has a robots.txt file that prohibits crawling the genealogical records, we don't search those records. If records from your website are included and you'd like them removed, please send a request to websearch@an​cestry​​.com.