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I’m willing to wager Ancestry does digitization better, faster and cheaper than any non profit would.
by NoblePublius 8y ago
I’m willing to wager Ancestry does digitization better, faster and cheaper than any non profit would.
- jerrysievert 8y agoor that ancestry has a low-friction data ingestion pipeline that is many less steps than a standard data request.
- nyolfen 8y agocheaper for whom? their basic subscription is $200/y
- andrewem 8y agoThe counterexample to your claim is FamilySearch.org, which worked with Reclaim the Records on digitizing a set of records. (It's a nonprofit run by the LDS church, which is a behemoth in genealogy records.)
- dsiegel2275 8y agoCouldn't upvote this enough. I have done significant genealogical research over the last 6 or 7 years, using primarily Ancestry and FamilySearch.org. FamilySearch, particularly for non U.S. records, offers access to an order of magnitude more resources than Ancestry, though not all of them are digitally indexed. Ancestry, with its larger budget, seems to have invested heavily in digitizing and making available a small subset of commonly used resources, resources that will enable more casual users to make quick progress. So records like the 1940 U.S. Census and state-based death certificates (usually up to 1960) are digitized, and thus made widely available to keep and draw new subscribers.
- NoblePublius 8y agoRead what I wrote and try again. I said nothing about which records were scanned or what they did with them after scanning. I merely spoke of the scanning itself which, buoyed by a profit motive, will be optimized for speed and efficiency, unlike a non profit.