| You are not paying for your own family info.
The money that you pay is for the convenience of having it online, at your own desk, rather than having to travel (often across the entire country) to find it for yourself.
I researched for 25 yrs before ever subscribing to ancestry (which I did in the last month). I made phone calls (when people still paid long distance), paid postage and copy fees; rented microfilm from the LDS family history center (they pay for facilities to store and copy records, there is a minimal handling fee per film); I made several trips from CA to the Salt Lake library (including hotel costs); personally tramped through a pasture to find an abandoned cemetery (and paid for medicine for the chigger bites)...so forth. Birth/death certificates are govt. documents, you still have to pay a fee for the copy unless it is already in family files.
I invested thousands of dollars to do research, without an online website. Relatives then expected me to 'give' them the results, without offering so much as postage help. Others, realizing what I had done..took up collections at family reunions for my contribution.
You are absolutely free to collect information on your own. On your own would also mean NOT DOWNLOADING the results of someone else's work, in all fairness. They did the work (unless they ripped it off from someone else).
Once you do real research.. meaning, finding the answers that no one knows, and is not online.. count up what you have spent. Witn no disrespect intended, if you have never done this, you don't know what it involves.
You might find the online convenience is a bargain, in comparison.  |