Poll: Do you pay to use the genealogy sites, or do you refuse to pay for

[indigo]

your own family information? Personally I can't stand the idea of having to pay for my family's own info.

[Boomer Wisdom]

My family history was lost.

I'm a cheap-skate, and easily irritated by not getting free stuff, but I have a limited amount of time and money available for searching for this lost family history. I prefer to delegate certain chores to services that specialize in procuring such data, and find that so far, it's been a very cost effective strategy. This leaves more time and money for my own research, and cuts down the waste when I'm looking for primary records.

Internet services earn their money or they wouldn't be in business.

[jay k]

I wouldn't pay for that

[wendy c]

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.

[Lol Primates]

I imagine you would be prepared to pay if you wanted to learn to play the piano or for some other hobby you wanted to pursue.

I don't understand why people have the idea that genealogy should be free. Take a site like Ancestry for example, it would be thousands of hours of work to index a census and then the images have to be scanned and made available on line - do you think companies should provide that service for love?

And before there were all these pay sites if you wanted to find out something about your ancestors you very often had to go to the source of the records or pay a researcher by the hour if you couldn't get there yourself. A very expensive proposition indeed, especially looking for someone with a fairly common surname in a big city.

So yes, I am happy to pay money to make the hobby of researching my family history easy and fun!