What Happens to Your Family Tree If You Stop Paying?

On most major genealogy platforms, cancelling your subscription does not delete your family tree. The tree stays in your account and you can generally still view and edit the names, dates, and relationships you entered. What you lose is access to the historical records you attached to it — census images, military records, newspaper clippings, and other licensed content that was only ever rented as part of the subscription.

That gap between what people fear and what actually happens is worth being precise about, because the real loss is not the one most people brace for. Nobody deletes your tree. They stop showing you the documents that made it credible.

Why the records disappear but the tree does not

The names and dates you typed in are your data. The scanned 1910 census page you linked to a great-grandfather is licensed content the platform pays to host. When the subscription ends, the link often remains but the image behind it stops opening. Your tree still says the source exists; you just cannot see it anymore.

This surprises people because attaching a record feels like saving it. It is closer to bookmarking it. If the citation matters to your research, the time to save an actual copy is while you still have access, not after.

The part almost everyone gets wrong: GEDCOM does not carry photos

GEDCOM is the universal genealogy export format, and it is genuinely portable — nearly every platform can read and write it. But it was designed in the 1980s around vital records. It carries people, dates, places, and relationships. It does not carry your photographs, scanned documents, or long-form stories.

This is the single most common migration regret. Someone exports a GEDCOM, cancels their subscription, imports the file somewhere else, and discovers that three hundred family photographs did not come with it. The structural tree is intact and the visual archive is gone.

If a platform offers a separate media or archive download alongside GEDCOM, take both. If it does not, budget real time for downloading images manually before you cancel.

What to export before you cancel anything

Do this while the subscription is still active, in this order:

• A GEDCOM file. Your structural tree — everyone, every date, every relationship. This is your portability guarantee and it takes seconds.
• Photos and documents, separately. Look for a media export, an archive download, or a full-backup ZIP. Assume the GEDCOM does not include them, because it does not.
• Copies of the source records you actually rely on. Save the images for the citations that carry weight in your research. You are not entitled to redistribute licensed content, but keeping a personal copy of a record you cited is ordinary research practice.
• Your notes and stories. Frequently stored outside the GEDCOM and frequently the least replaceable thing in the account, because it is the part that was never a public record to begin with.

Then verify the export before you cancel. Open the GEDCOM in a different program and confirm the generation count and a few dates look right. An export you never opened is not a backup.

Questions worth asking before you commit to any platform

These apply to any genealogy service, including this one:

Can you export a GEDCOM on the free tier, or is export itself behind the paywall? Export gated behind a subscription means leaving requires paying to leave.

Is there a way to get your photos out in bulk, or only one at a time? One-at-a-time is a soft lock-in for anyone with a serious media collection.

What happens to your data when you downgrade rather than cancel? Some platforms retain everything and simply restrict features; that is much safer than deletion.

And who owns the company now? Genealogy platforms change hands, and the terms you agreed to are not necessarily the terms the next owner operates under. The 23andMe bankruptcy made that concrete for a lot of people who had assumed their data was governed by a stable relationship.

How Family Roots Center handles this

Every export is available on every plan, including the free one. There is no tier gate on getting your data out: GEDCOM, CSV, a full JSON backup, a printable PDF poster, a vector PDF of the current view, a narrative Family Book PDF, Family Group Sheets, and an "Everything" ZIP archive containing your GEDCOM, your backup, and your photographs together.

That last one exists specifically because of the GEDCOM photo gap described above. A structural export that silently drops your images is the standard failure mode of leaving a genealogy platform, and one file that contains both is the fix.

Downgrading does not delete anything. Your data stays; the features narrow.