I'm surprised Ancestry.com doesn't charge people for the data recovery. They would clearly pay since many paid $60 for the third party service beforehand. The

I'm surprised Ancestry.com doesn't charge people for the data recovery. They would clearly pay since many paid $60 for the third party service beforehand. There is no way I can believe Ancestry.com doesn't have the technical talent to pull the raw data from the system pretty trivially. Unless it was running on some obscure in-house database backend that doesn't exist anymore and thus can't be read, I don't see why they can't put an engineer on this project for a month [and if it takes them that long...] and at least give people the raw data. Or partner with Spokt or whatever and have them charge a fee to transfer it if they want to cover their costs. People are willing to pay for this data, even if it is incomplete or difficult to digest in the delivered format. I also can't imagine they don't have a copy of the data somewhere... on some old magnetic backup tape or squirreled away in some DB admin's folders.