Dag gum! Ted is on a roll tonight! Hugs to you, Ted.

You have read several answers that explain that you aren’t paying for the information, you are paying for the convenience. Let me expand on that. Ancestry.com has all of the censuses nicely indexed so that you can pull up a persons name and locate them in the census. Before they were nicely indexed you had to look at them on microfilm readers in the libraries or at the National archives. Not only did you have to look at them on micrifilm readers, there was a procedure.
1) First of all you had to find out what the soundex code was for the last name you were researching AND the state you were looking in.
2)You then you had to pull the corresponding microfilm and search through ALL of the cards with that soundex code until you found the person you were looking for. No, not everthing was alphabetized on the roll.
3) IF you found the card you were looking for, you would need to write down the E.D. , S.D. Sheet number, and line number that was on the “card” you found
4) With THAT information, you needed to locate the census roll and pull yet another microfilm before you could locate the census information of ONE family.

This was a very lengthy process before it was indexed and put online. First of all, you could ONLY look up the head of household before, now you can look up anybody in the family. Before you had to sift through countless microfilms to get a handful of census entries, now you put in the search terms and go. Now you can look up SEVERAL people in a short period of time without wearing out your arm turning the microfilm handle. In the days of microfilm, it was much harder to find someone who was misindexed, now you can pull up all of the people named Fred in a given county and search through them. whereas before, you couldn’t do that.

I hope that I’ve made my point on how much more convenient it is, to pay for a subscription than it is to search using the old technology. The census alone makes the money I pay for my subscription worth it.

Think of it this way. People have no trouble spending almost 20 bucks a month to have the latest DVD’s delivered to their doorstep so that they can watch movies in the privacy of their own home. Us genealogists like to take the same money and put it toward a subscription. At the end of the day, which person takes away the most? I would bet the genealogist does, hands down.

You can always go on down to the local library and use their subscription to ancestry. This way, you aren’t paying for a subscription. You are only out the cost for gas and parking., but please don’t go in your underwear with a salami sandwich!

You are not paying for the data. You are paying for the CONVENIENCE. If you want to fly to a county seat, rent a hotel room, eat in places that consider grits to be one of the four major food groups and pore thought records, you can. Then go to the next county, and the next.

Spend a week with paper indexes to each census, fly to the National Archive that has the microfilm, load it, find the right page, transcribe . . .

I subscribe to Ancestry. I can find my dead ancestors at 4 in the morning, in my underwear, drinking beer and eating a salami sandwich. Try THAT in a national archive!!!

I wouldn’t pay for that

My family history was lost.

I’m a cheap-skate, and easily irritated by not getting free stuff, but I have a limited amount of time and money available for searching for this lost family history. I prefer to delegate certain chores to services that specialize in procuring such data, and find that so far, it’s been a very cost effective strategy. This leaves more time and money for my own research, and cuts down the waste when I’m looking for primary records.

Internet services earn their money or they wouldn’t be in business.

As the above posters has stated, what you see online is for the convenience of people who do not want to spend gasoline money, money on motels and eating out and the time digging through old records etc., walking through cemeteries etc.
Those who own those websites has paid people to make it more available to you and me. That’s all.

There are family trees on many website but they are subscriber submitted, mostly not documented or poorly documented. They can be extremely useful as CLUES only as to where to get the documentation. This is true for free or fee sites. You might find some of your family lines. If you see in those family trees that some of your family lines are related to every royal or noble house in Europe, don’t get excited. You might be, but it could be the submitter did a lot of speculating. Even if you see the same info by many other subscribers that is absolutely no guarantee it is correct. A lot of people copy without verifying.

But there are some useful records at Ancestry.Com. Not that they have all the records. No way are all the records on line.
People have been saved a lot of time and money by taking advantage of what they have.

Their transcription of the census records sometimes is not always totally accurate but when you look at the original image, you can understand why.

Actually if someone has done the work and researched your family, you have no right to expect that person to give you what all they have found. If they have a book published on their work, they have a right to expect you to buy their book if you want to know what they have found in their research.

However, don’t take as absolute fact everything in a published book unless the author provides documentation in their book.

I would pay for it. Its better than sitting down in like a stuffy room reading through everything.

You are absolutely right. Having to pay for your own family’s information is criminal.

Fortunately you don’t have to! Take the 1930 census for example. Just stroll on over to the Archives on your lunch break. I mean, a typical county only has maybe 300 or so census pages so to find your great grandparents would only require you to examine maybe 2,500 or so pages.

That someone would charge me to be able to accomplish the same thing in about 20 seconds, by having hundreds of people spend thousands of hours indexing and photographing those records is horrible. And the leeches who did all the work expected to be paid as well - how obnoxious.

Then heck, just go to each of the states where those great grandparents were born, hit the Vital Records Office (or maybe the state archives for older records) and get birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates. Probably only would have to travel to 8 cities (or maybe 24 if they were born, married and died in different places). How dare they charge me to be able to get that online from my lounge chair.

Of course, repeat the process for all other relatives. And of course you should stop by the various military record sites around the US and see if there are draft records for maybe WWI or WWII for your ancestors, or maybe civil war records.

And equally easy, stop by New York City, Boston, New Orleans, maybe Canadian border crossing records offices and dig through their maybe 60,000+ pages of manifests to see if you can stumble across the records of your ancestors immigrating to the US. I can’t believe someone would have the NERVE to charge for that information for MY family.

Oh yea, don’t forget land and tax records. Those are public access - of course you would have to travel to each city and dig through again thousands of pages hoping to find that one entry corresponding to great grandpa.

You’re right, the thought having to pay for my family’s info is something I can’t stand either. And I refuse to do so. And after 5 years, I only have 7 great grandparents to go! Maybe in 15 or so years, I may start doing my aunts, uncles, great aunts or even my 2nd great grandparents. There are only 16 of those so that should only take maybe 20 years or so to do.

Hummm, maybe being able to do it in an hour with my coffee in front of me from my desk in the evening is worth it. Naaaah.

You are not paying for your own family info.
The money that you pay is for the convenience of having it online, at your own desk, rather than having to travel (often across the entire country) to find it for yourself.
I researched for 25 yrs before ever subscribing to ancestry (which I did in the last month). I made phone calls (when people still paid long distance), paid postage and copy fees; rented microfilm from the LDS family history center (they pay for facilities to store and copy records, there is a minimal handling fee per film); I made several trips from CA to the Salt Lake library (including hotel costs); personally tramped through a pasture to find an abandoned cemetery (and paid for medicine for the chigger bites)…so forth. Birth/death certificates are govt. documents, you still have to pay a fee for the copy unless it is already in family files.
I invested thousands of dollars to do research, without an online website. Relatives then expected me to ‘give’ them the results, without offering so much as postage help. Others, realizing what I had done..took up collections at family reunions for my contribution.
You are absolutely free to collect information on your own. On your own would also mean NOT DOWNLOADING the results of someone else’s work, in all fairness. They did the work (unless they ripped it off from someone else).
Once you do real research.. meaning, finding the answers that no one knows, and is not online.. count up what you have spent. Witn no disrespect intended, if you have never done this, you don’t know what it involves.
You might find the online convenience is a bargain, in comparison.

It is not YOUR information. It is the GOVERNMENT’S information about your family. All those records were created LONG before there were computers. It has taken the work of countless people many, many years to slowly and systematically take all those records from paper files and transcribe them all one page at a time, onto the internet so you can see them from the comfort of your own home with a few clicks of the mouse, instead of digging through dusty basements and record rooms of courthouses and other facilities; costing you a fortune in travel expenses, versus a few dollars a year on your credit card to stay home. Trust me, you WILL spend tons more in travel expenses for just one trip out of town to a courthouse than you will spend for an entire year on Ancestry.com.

So quit your complaining. Be thankful you have that option now. 20 years ago there was NO other option other than traveling from place to place yourself.

I imagine you would be prepared to pay if you wanted to learn to play the piano or for some other hobby you wanted to pursue.

I don’t understand why people have the idea that genealogy should be free. Take a site like Ancestry for example, it would be thousands of hours of work to index a census and then the images have to be scanned and made available on line - do you think companies should provide that service for love?

And before there were all these pay sites if you wanted to find out something about your ancestors you very often had to go to the source of the records or pay a researcher by the hour if you couldn’t get there yourself. A very expensive proposition indeed, especially looking for someone with a fairly common surname in a big city.

So yes, I am happy to pay money to make the hobby of researching my family history easy and fun!