Many people feel that all information on the internet should be free. The genealogy community is especially keen on feeling this way, since we are one of the largest groups on users of information on the internet. For many years we got used to finding free information in libraries, state archive, and national archives or from the kindness of people who put information on free websites.
But behind all of the supposed free information we use are taxpayers who in a sense are paying the fee for all of use to use free resources in libraries or archives. So it is not really free. Libraries and archives would not exist without either taxes or a large number of donations (which also means some citizens paid “fees”).
A good example is the LDS church which pays large sums of money to maintain their free family research centers and their big internet site www.familysearch.org, all paid for by the church members. Financing had to come from somewhere to buy new material or machines, coordinate it, catalog it, file or shelve it and maintain it. These same costs exist for state or national archives.
Some non-electronic resources such as special libraries, genealogical societies and records offices do charge a fee for use. Some government resources in other countries charge as well. To get vital records if you go to Scotland you may have to use the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS). They charge a fee to do work there. See http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/index.html. To get online Scottish vital records you can go to the website http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/, but it also will cost you to view the actual records. They use a system of buying credits. Other organizations only charge for non residents.
Some huge on-line repositories of data such as www.rootsweb.com are funded by the company that owns them, and also owns Ancestry.com. So Ancestry.com members are actually funding Rootsweb.com. There are no free sites that cover all the axioms Good, Fast, Cheap. You can get two out of three maybe, but not all three.
To be fair, all of the effort to put records online does cost a good amount of money and time. Some costs of running a genealogy website might be:
- Hardware
- Software
- Humans
- Overhead
- Web servers
- Network equipment
- Maintenance contracts
- Computer programmers & Administrators
- Payment to indexers, transcribers
- Copyright costs
So, while we don’t like fees, they are almost impossible to totally avoid. Your best option is to only pay for access to sites you know you will heavily use. I have joined a few that I then rarely used, so I didn’t join again. Of course then you take a chance that a once in a lifetime genealogy record will eventually appear on that website, now that you don’t belong anymore! Yet you certainly can’t join every fee site out there. So you have to pick and choose from year to year, and use trial periods whenever possible.
The two websites that I and most of the fellow genealogist that I know belong to, as a start, are:
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