On 25/07/2010 08:02, Jo Ann wrote: > Sandy, you said: " Genealogy is a very big earner in this county . . . ."? I was > just wondering a few days ago why it is so hard to find any information in > Scotland on ancestors without shelling out moeny for it, unlike the States, > where many websites are free, and people so freely share their information > without expecting payment.? ** Jo Ann, the main difference is due to copyright. In the USA, the government does not hold a copyright on its records, whereas in the UK, the Crown (read Government) holds copyright in all national government records - civil registration, census returns, etc.. This means the government bodies can make charges for use of the material, or delegate this to another body (such as Scotlandspeople). They have discovered that they can make a lot of income through relatively small fees per item, and this (in theory at least) means that more records can be indexed, digitized, etc. and so made readily available without the taxpayer having to pay for this. If there had been no prospect of income, the government records would remain almost inaccessible.... Regards, Gordon Johnson.