Ancestry.com launched a new offering called Ancestry Academy in April, and I finally had a chance to try out some of its courses this week. To access Ancestry Academy, you need either a free login or a subscription. A free login will get you access to some of the courses, but you will be able to see all the titles available. Subscription detail appears at the end of this article.

To get to Ancestry Academy from the main page at ancestry.com, you can either pull down the Learning Center tab or the Extras tab on the “New” Ancestry, and choose Ancestry Academy. You can also select it from the choices on the right side or use this link: https://www.ancestry.com/academy. You may want to view the tutorial video before starting the first course. There is a text link to it at the bottom of the Ancestry Academy page, but it’s also accessible from the Help link: https://www.ancestry.com/academy/help.

The courses are grouped under four categories: Ancestry Products, Methodology and Skills, Records, and Localities and Ethnic Research. The courses about Ancestry Products are free; most of the others – but not all – are by subscription. There are 22 courses as of this writing, but the site says that more are being added monthly. In fact, the “Coming Soon” section below the others showed another 10 courses in the pipeline.

As mentioned earlier, you need to register on the Ancestry.com to access the courses in Ancestry Academy. At that point, there are 3 ways to access courses: (1) You can sign up with your email address to access the courses labeled “FREE.” (2.) You can subscribe to Ancestry Academy for $11.99/month or $99.99/year to access all courses. (3.) Access to all courses is included with Ancestry’s All Access subscription. And, of course, you can select a course you want to watch the next time you are in the Genealogy Center.