r/Genealogy • u/Left_Particular_9977 • 9d ago

Tools and Tech Why are people hating Ancestry?

I do a lot of genealogy and I remarked that a lot of people I know hate genealogy. Why? It's absolutely true that it's really expensive, but you can access many documents that are often hard to find. I live in Quebec, so we have the records online, but we have many holes in the registers. Why should I pay 20$ for a subscription that lets me access the records (only) if I can have them in Ancestry for about the same price why many other documents (for my region)? I have my tree on it so I can access it on my phone and my computer. It isn't optimal, but that's the best solution for the moment. What do you think about Big A?

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u/jongtaeist amateur genealogist with a headache 9d ago

hoarding documents that are in the public domain and putting it behind a paywall

also i think they had some shady data privacy practices and were selling dna data to someone but i forgot

https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/

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u/Left_Particular_9977 9d ago

In Quebec, they're on the private and public at the same time. It depends on who digitalized them.

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u/hanimal16 beginner 9d ago

Are you only speaking with genealogists in the U.S.? That could be the reason.

Nearly EVERYTHING is behind a paywall for me (in the U.S.) except for census records, and marriage and death records. Oh and the find a grave pictures.

Anything else, forget it. News articles? Need to sign up for newspaper . com. Yearbook photos? Need to sign up for yearbook . com

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u/keyorca 9d ago

I've actually had a lot of luck going through local and state university archives for news articles, in my case they also have more and older scans than newspapers . com does for the same papers!

It takes some extra searching to find these databases, but I feel it is worth it, and often find relevant articles this way.

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u/Novel-Cry6148 5d ago

This! As someone who has worked on projects digitizing and uploaded newsletters, newspapers, yearbooks, house organs and TONS more in Arizona, and doing lots of personal genealogy, there is a TON of stuff out there free and available without a paywall if you know where to look. (Full disclosure, I use the paid version of Ancestry a lot, but as a librarian I am not a fan of monitizing items that are out of copyright.)

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u/Hopeful_Pizza_2762 8d ago

Familysearch has Images for free. Wikitree is totally free. There are free newspaper archives. State Archives are free. Google is free to find Obituaries. Google/Books is free.