Are you a "nattering nabob of negativity?"

[Caroline]

An interesting read this morning in Dick Eastman's newsletter:
I Have a Complaint Concerning Many Genealogists

We sometimes get complaints on here about the costs of subscriptions and that the data should be free to all. He makes the point that it is, but ....

[Elaine ..Spain]

... couldn't agree more.
I think many people tend to forget that just over a decade ago there was very little genealogy information available on the internet, either free or by subscription. We are lucky that more and more is being released and obviously companies that are providing this information need to be reimbursed for their efforts of putting it online.

[Caroline]

Like you, without the companies who provide the data online, I wouldn't have got very far at all with my research when I was living overseas!!

[Christine in Herts]

A very valid article.

The only thing that is problematic (for me) is that the commercial companies don't seem to make any commercial acknowledgement of the free proof-reading provided by (some of) their customers. It doesn't matter how many valid corrections you submit to Ancestry, you don't get a penny off the subscription. The same is true of FMP - but they do, at least, operate an automatic loyalty discount.

But it is, indeed, vastly cheaper to have all those records centralised and accessible through an indexed database.

Christine