Genealogy need NOT be an expensive hobby. What makes it so is pay sites like @ncestry gouging people and hoarding publicly available information. And yes I know the argument that they pay loads of money and they perform a valuable service and all that, but it doesn't change the fact that everything they do would be done eventually at free sights like FreeBMD FreeCEN and RC. I'd rather support volunteers and other Genealogists who are helping people in the hobby. Folks here at RC have helped me immensely and I'd like to think that's the way it should be.
I am glad you can afford to spend large amounts of money on this. I and many others cannot. But we still deserve the same access to our ancestors as you do.
Genealogy has never been cheaper and that is in part due to the online companies competing to provide access to digitised copies of original records.
I lived in a small village in Scotland in the 1950s, to view a census page I had to travel 430 miles, search a thick, heavy, unindexed census “book” for the relevant folio, then transcribe the information by hand before moving on to the next entry.
Similar journeys would have to be made to churches and archives up and down the country to see the original records, comparatively few records were even transcribed until the 1970s when family history societies began to become popular.
Yes you may have to wait ten minutes to access a record that would normally appear on your screen in seconds but that cannot be compared to waiting six months or a year to arrange a trip to the archives to view the record and the price is nothing compared to the time and expense a visit to a distant archive used to cost.
As for “everything they do would be done eventually at free sights”, sorry but I am afraid that is a dream, it took the resources of the LDS to microfilm parish registers and census something they were doing for about 50 years before the internet and even they shied away from transcribing census records for many years.
That is not to detract from the likes of Freebmd it is simply facing facts.
If it was not for these internet companies many if not most of today’s genealogists would not be researching their family history because it was simply too difficult and too expensive.
Cheers
Guy
PS where records were transcribed they tended to be available in print runs of 100 to 150 copies and therefore unobtainable to most.
