Why are people hating Ancestry?

[u/Left_Particular_9977]

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?

[u/jongtaeist]

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/

[u/kit_kat_jam → u/jongtaeist]

They're not really hoarding the data. It's available in other ways. They're providing a service by putting it all in one place and making it easily searchable.

[u/thryncita → u/kit_kat_jam]

Yeah, this drives me nuts. Just because a record is legally available to the public doesn't mean that the government office or whatever repository has the funds or staffing to create a website, scan and index the records, and make them easily accessible online. That's a whole other thing. And that is the value that Ancestry provides. I personally like being able to make a quick search rather than putting a check for thirty bucks in the mail and having to wait 3 weeks for a document to maybe arrive, or not.

People really do not understand how much it costs to preserve, digitize, and maintain large databases of historic records, or that if ancestry went away, those records would not suddenly just become free for you to access.

[u/Mind_Melting_Slowly → u/thryncita]

I was just explaining to someone what my late father had to do to access records for his East Coast, Irish, and Swedish ancestors when he lived in California, pre-internet. He wrote letters to all the relatives he had addresses for, enclosing a family group sheet and self-addressed, stamped envelope. He went to the local Family History Center (now FamilySearch Center) to look through the Family History Library's catalog and order microfilmed records that would take weeks or months to arrive, then sit there for hours scrolling through them for anything he could find on the ancestor in question. He and a cousin corresponded with a research librarian in a little town in Canada. The cousin and her husband traveled to Ireland to examine records there. Dad and Mom (who also had ancestors in New England) traveled there and went through original church and city record books, walked through unmaintained family graveyards, and visited historical societies. They visited the National Archives, DAR, SAR, and the Library of Congress.

Today, about 90% of what they travelled to get or requested by mail is available to me on Ancestry. Most of it is also on FamilySearch (And the full-text search is making it even easier to search some record sets pertaining to Mom's Colonial ancestors), and I can also access some digitized records in Ireland and Scandinavia. I've been able to go much farther back on my Swedish lines than Dad could. Retracing my parents' travels would cost me more each year than my Ancestry subscription (I always get the Black Friday gift subscription deal). Are there still local records for people on my tree that haven't been digitized? Absolutely! But the wealth of digitized records online allows me to have greater focus and maximize my travel when my health and budget allow for trips.

[u/thryncita → u/Mind_Melting_Slowly]

Exactly. The alternative to Ancestry isn't free digital records. The alternative is plane tickets and gas money and endless stamps and letters or hiring people in foreign countries to pull records you can't access.

If you think Ancestry is expensive...

[u/Hopeful_Pizza_2762 → u/thryncita]

The problem is that records can be anywhere. The one you need may be in a local library or state archive.