"Is there any way to see Ancestry's so called 'public trees' without being a subscriber or pestering the owner for an invitation?" No. In this context, 'public' means available to anyone as long as they have an Ancestry.com subscription. Re someone's comment about Ancestry stealing trees from another site, I wonder if that referred to the fact that trees posted at Rootsweb Worldconnect show up within Ancestry.com? That's to be expected, it is one of the two prices paid for Worldconnect hosting one's family tree for free. Ancestry also sponsors hundreds (thousands?) of free mailing lists like this one, which similarly show up within Ancestry.com. (The other price paid for a free Worldconnect tree is that ads are displayed on the pages of the tree. But with FireFox, NoScript, & Adblock Plus, I don't even see the ads.) I do appreciate the fact that Ancestry.com provides those services gratis. Of course I expect that they view it as an investment. (It's called Capitalism...) For those who WANT their family trees to be hidden from the general public, Ancestry.com is a great place for hosting a tree; photos etc can be attached to individuals, and many other features are available. On the other hand, for people who like me feel that genealogical research should be shared, putting one's tree behind Ancestry.com's wall makes little sense. Beyond the issue of public visibility, one of the main problems with having Ancestry.com host your online tree is that once you start, you tend to be locked in to paying a subscription fee forever -exactly as Ancestry.com desires. What happens when you stop paying? Moving data maintained there to other programs seems to often cause problems (apparently Ancestry.com trees as well as their consumer genealogy program, Family Tree Maker, export gedcoms in non-standard format), and the majority of users probably do not even know that it can be moved. I am a huge fan of the system available to host trees for free at Ancestry's Rootsweb Worldconnect, at least for those who are OK with displaying the basic info with no frills. If you have a 23andMe account you can see a long discussion I started about how to post your tree at Worldconnect, and some of the reasons that keeping a tree behind Ancestry.com's wall is less constructive: https://www.23andme.com/you/community/thread/3619/ Rootsweb Worldconnect allows you to suppress details of living persons born after any year you choose. You can decide whether your notes and sources will be visible. (Mine are not visible, since they contain my sources' personal contact info.) It is EASY to update. In contrast to ancestry.com trees, Rootsweb Worldconnect trees are indexed by search engines such as Google. If someone searches for a specific name, there is a good chance they will find your tree. I've had many relatives (who I didn't know existed) find my Rootsweb tree via google search & contact me. The presentation allows the viewer to decide whether to view an individual's details (group sheet view), descendants, ahnentafel format, etc, or to look for other possible connections in your tree. Here's where to start, assuming your data is already maintained within a program that can export your data in the form of a gedcom file) (-and Ancestry.com trees are able to do that): http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ Richard Thrift ---- Rebecca <rbccstrr@aol.co.uk> wrote: Is there any way to see Ancestry's so called 'public trees' without being a subscriber or pestering the owner for an invitation? I set up a tree at Ancestry with the idea that others could freely access it, but they cannot.