If you’ve been enjoying the benefits of free remote or at-home access to Ancestry through your local library since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, that may be coming to an end this month.
The Toronto Public Library, Vancouver Public Library, Edmonton Public Library, and several other libraries in Canada have advised on their websites that remote service will stop at the end of December.
Free access, of course, will continue on site at public libraries for card holders.
When public libraries closed at the beginning of the pandemic, ProQuest and its partner, Ancestry, allowed them to provide their customers with remote access until the end of April 2020. Then, the free access was extended to the end of May and then to the end of 2020.
By December 2020, public libraries in North America and Britain were announcing on social media that at-home access to Ancestry for their library cardholders had been extended until March 31, 2021. Free remote access was extended a couple of more times after that, with the latest being December 31, 2021.
Now that libraries are open, the series of extensions has likely run out.
