Guy Audoir de Valter < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it wrote in message i think my self that you should NEVER pay for genealogy informations...except when you buy books like I do....Ancestry did not make any recherch themself they use work from others..........I hate that..... Ancestry did the work any records repository is supposed to. They paid to put census images online, among other things. That is an expensive proposition. Anyone who likes to do real research using real records truly benefits from having access to actual IMAGES of the records, so that they don't have to take someone's word for anything. What else do you want a records repository to do for you? The research you should be doing? I love Ancestry.com. The yearly fee is worth it for the US census records alone, for me. Anyone who expects to get everything free and online is either A. Doing really BAD research and/or B. In for a rude awakening. In theory, I disagree.  What they are doing is charging for you to access public records.  By definition, ACCESS to public records is free (by government mandate and our tax dollars).  [Reproduction of such records generally isn't, but simply viewing a record and obtaining a copy are two separate acts. That's what the public records acts of various governmental entities effectively mean.] Nobody owes you anything. If you cannot get to the courthouses or state/national archives to get at the records you need, why should you expect someone to spend their time making those things available to you for free? We are lucky to have the volunteers who post ACTUAL SCANS OF RECORDS, which are the only online sources I use. Anyone who cannot get to the original records and is not only too cheap to hire an archives/courthouse researcher but also too cheap to spring for a sub_script_ion to Ancestry.com needs to find a new hobby. Just my opinion, of course! At least they're not in the business of selling the work on CD's of others that is GIVEN to them without compensation like genealogy.com is. It's not a matter of being CHEAP.  It's a matter of paying to access that which is otherwise FREE. Well said, Jennifer. And those who suggest that these public records (county and state)should be made accessible online by the governments involved are not likely going to want to pay for that process. Many complain about high taxes as it is, and there is not even enough county or state funding to keep our schools from being disgraceful, so you know there isn't going to be any for an expensive process that only aids genealogists. Not quite true in several situations (e.g. California and Texas; probably others), where the records WERE accessible on-line for free (and the cost of bringing about that access was borne by the state governments as authorized by the people), yet on-line access to these records was recently WITHDRAWN.  In that situation, the public HAS PAID for on-line access and no longer has it. The public publishing of death records can be a deterrant to identity theft of the deceased (which does happen), if merchants cared to check....  Since that lowers crime, any such program has a built-in offset to its cost (whether the savings by not having to prosecute outweighs the cost of making the death records available has not been examined).