Dm Tomo the op raises a valid point and it is interesting to read the various opinions cast out by the audience, but that original point is really to do with what we the 'public' actually receive in exchange for having govts control our lives.
Of course ALL records should be openly available not subjected to the whims of various persons with selective purposes.
Which is what happens here in the UK!
Public Records are archived in designated archives and the public have a right to inspect them.
You paid for those records with your taxes and to have them offered at a price is tantamont to double billing. Would you pay for your tv license twice?
This is where you go wrong in your assumptions.
Taxes pay to create the records and to archive the records. The public who wish to view the records are charged a fee in order to view the records.
That fee covers the cost of the viewing facilities plus the costs to staff the facilites and the costs involved in retrieving the records from and returning the records to the storage.
Why should the taxpayer pay for such costs?
For us who can't access the record halls or such as we live far away the price and efforts demanded of us to enable the purpose we require such records to be available is extortionate.
Is it, think how much it would cost you to visit the archive.
Instead in many cases it is possible to view the records in your home.
This facility requires either archive staff copying the original record each time a copy is required. This has costs not only time & money but materials and possibly damage to the original record as well.
An alternative is to allow a third party to digitise the record and make that available by other means such as online.
This also has a number of costs but lessens the damage to the original record.
However digitising is not cheap and the costs involved need to be covered.
Perhaps it would be of more sense to remember that the church and govt belongs to us and not we to them - and thus they should do our bidding in an open manner.
The church and the government are different entities.
The Church of England is a privately funded body which compiles its own records some of which are publically accessible by law, these are not public records.
In a similar way other churches compile their own records some of which are accessible to the public some are not.
Free BMD and its partner sites exemplifies the best of purposes unlike so many of the moneygrabbing gen sites.
But that's just my opinion and my 2 cents worth!
Keep at it DM Tomo - never admit you are not free.
FreeBMD and its partner sites are charities funded by the public and can only afford to supply records free of charge because the public donate money to them to allow them to compile and host the records; I believe they have also benefited from a grant or grants from the Government in the past.
The “moneygrabbing gen sites” as you call them are commercial sites who have to pay their own costs and in most cases pay licence fees to host records held by government archives such as the GRO.
For example census records are licenced to the various commercial sites, this costs the companies money which has to be found somewhere.
The public basically have a choice of travelling to the archive and viewing the record free of any additional charges, paying more taxes to enable the archives to view digitised copies of the records in their own homes, or paying a commercial company a fee to enable them to view copies of the records at home.
Nothing is free but we do have a choice of who we pay and how much we pay.
Cheers
Guy
