Personally, I do not care whether the site is free or not. Actually, Ancestry.com does have operating expenses. What I regret are the incorrect data. Send an e-mail to the poster and almost guaranteed that you will not receive a response that generally means that the person copied the data from somebody else or their e-mail is out-of-date. One other thing that irritates me is that you try a lookup and you indicate that you want data on a person in order to completely cover a range from 1650-1800. You will get those, but you will also get inundated with people born after 1900. Thus Ancestry can balloon the number of hits you get.
Some data contain death dates older than birth dates.
The LDS data are free. I am not LDS, buy I appreciate greatly the service that they provide. If a person uses only the "official" (parish registers et al) data, they can better rely on the information.
Lastly, as I could go on, some of these free sites appear to be selling out to Ancestry and those Public ID sites which promise to provide "dirty information" on you. Enter the name of someone in your genealogy whom you are trying to find and you likely will land in Ancestry or one of these public disclosure sites.
Enough!
Don
PS : a few days ago I attempted to update my e-mail on VA-HIST.
On Nov 3, 2010, at 12:25 PM, Keith Kirkland wrote:
> To add (re: Ancestry) :
>
> On Oct 21, Ancestry announced their purchase of iArchives.com, the parent
> company of footnote.com, thus limiting the number of "big" pay-for-play
> companies.
>
> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ancestrycom-inc-completes-acquisition-of-iarchives-2010-10-21
>
> Additionally, Yahoo! suspended hosting of their major and traditionally free
> hosting service Geocities in October of last year. All pages hosted there
> (many by hobbyist genealogist like myself) are no longer available.
> Apparently, there were some attempts to index/save the information prior to
> going offline, however there is no concensus on how much was accomplished by
> the Internet Archive as the amount of information that would have to be
> crawled on such short notice was prohibitively large. A 1TB torrent of all
> Geocities sites has been released "in the wild" and was announced recently,
> however.
>
> http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/geocities-to-be-released-as-a-torrent-904057
>
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 12:00 PM, JEFFREY D SOUTHMAYD <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
>
>> It's my understanding ancestry.com is making money hand over fist. If
>> true, someone must be interested in genealogy.
>>
>>
>> JDS
>>
>>
>
> --
> Keith Kirkland
>
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