Ancestry.com

A while ago, I was a subscriber to Ancestry.com, which was great. But after a while, I couldn't justify paying so much for something I wasn't using every single day. So I switched to the pay-per-view system, so I could only pay when I was on a real genealogy kick and wanted to view a few records.

For a long time, I was able to attach census records to my tree without using any credits. As long as I had some credits in my account, I could do this. If I wanted to actually view the record images (and not just see the indexes), I had to actually use a credit. That was fine by me. I was also able to attach records from other people's family trees without using credits... which I thought was great, since the information there is questionable at best. Why should I pay for someone else's assumptions?

Last time I was on the Ancestry site, though, I noticed that I couldn't do anything without using credits, other than attach the 1881 England census or records from the FreeBMD archives. Curious, I fired off an e-mail to Ancestry, only to be informed that I should have been charged credits all along, and that I should be happy for this little mistake.

Excuse me?

I'm supposed to spend almost a dollar each time I want to attach some random person's record to my tree, even though there's no way of knowing if the information is even correct? Don't get me wrong; that attaching feature has been a great way of building up my family tree. But it's only a beginning. To ensure accuracy, I then have to go and find other information that corroborates the other person's tree. If this was already done (meaning the information had already been checked out and verified), I wouldn't have a problem with paying for it. But as it is, someone could make up anything, put it in their tree... and Ancestry would still make us pay for it.

I'm a bit put off by Ancestry at the moment. I have much of my information there as private trees, mostly for backup purposes (in case my computer explodes or something). But I don't know how I feel about them making money off my information... especially if it's not even 100% correct information. I know that companies want to make money, but I find it a bit disgusting that we genealogists have to pay ridiculous amounts of money simply to find out things about our own heritage.