It seems to me that some people get offended at the thought of paying for genealogy. Why is it that a researcher should not be able to make a living while helping you out at the same time? As far as I can see, genealogists should not be treated different than any other professional in respect to their charges. This is America, a free economy, and prices are determined by supply and demand. With genealogy being one of the top hobbies in the country, the demand is higher than ever. If you collected stamps, you would not expect the post office to give them to you for free. Why should you expect genealogists to give away their services?If people could not make a living with genealogy, records would be so scarce that few people would have access to them. The government's WPA (Works Progress Administration) hired people back in the 1930s to copy and preserve historic documents, they became paid genealogists in effect. Think about on-line resources, ancestry.com, genealogy.com, they would be out of the game if they did not charge for their services. The odds of you having access to complete indexes for all of the US census records would be nil without their efforts. The Social Security Death Index would not be as accessible to most people if profit-based companies did not propagate it as they did a few years ago. I think some of you are being too hard, looking a gift horse in the mouth.
A lot of people think that all genealogy resources should be shared, like the USGenWeb Project. Well guess what, Rootsweb was taken over basically by Ancestry a few years back. Its funding comes from a profit company! Nothing is free. Everything costs someone money. If no one paid for genealogy, no one would take the time to walk cemeteries and transcribe tombstones or sift through thousands of old marriage bonds to write a book. I think we need to support people who dedicate their lives, 9 to 5 each day, to make genealogy resources more accessible for us all.
Pretend that you live in California and your ancestors came across the country from Virginia. How much time and money would you spend going to each courthouse in each place that they lived, all the way back to Virginia? You would spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in that pursuit. On the other hand, imagine paying $19.95 for a book of marriage records from a specific county or paying $250 to have a research track down a generation or two. There is no comparison in cost, you save time and money with the professional.
We should praise professional, for-profit researchers and give them a break. Their work is more thorough and more accurate than any free resource you will ever find. Any Tom, Dick or Harry and can make up anything, put it on-line and call it fact. As far as I am concerned, the old adage is true, you get what you pay for.
4 comments:
It was ridiculous when it went from $7.00 to $27.00 to get a Social Security record.
That kind of crap makes it tougher for some people to do research.
Terry C - NJ
I feel much the same about your comment. I pulled out a letter dated August 1996 from the Social Security Admin. that was sent with the SS-5 of my grandmother. It stated "Thank you for your check of $7.00 to cover our costs."
My mother just sent for an SS-5 of her grandmother and paid them $27.00 for the same thing I got for my grandmother (dads side).
The price of Military records have also skyrocketed.
Such is life I guess.
Terry R - S.NJ
I'm in agreement with your content, mostly, even though I DO appreciate some of the free genealogy helps that are on-line. Thousands of volunteers have for years provided a mountain of materials (albeit, much of it is just textually based and not compiled into a database that is easily accessible.)
Your article seems to discount the worth of the efforts of the volunteers.
At the same time, I'd like to say that I think the costs of services, like Ancestry.com are extremely fair and reasonable.
I do not discount the value of volunteers. Some just have better intentions than they do transcription skills! I just can't stand the attitude many people in the genealogy hobby have towards being charged for research or data. You get what you pay for, keep that in mind with free genealogy.
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