This is good information, passed on from another list.......... Ref. to NARA and a few other "Paid" site's for Genealogy. Tim R. ( I did not do this myself, just passing it along ) ***** { Forwarded Message: } The reason that I answered the original poster the way I did is because I have been in a unique position to observe what is actually going on at the National Archives and some other places. I realize that most people do not get to see what all I have seen. { See quote at the end } Having said that, I think it's appropriate to correct wrong information, and that's what I was doing. The person who originally posted was advertising for familysearch, which is a "nonprofit" that recruits volunteers to work for them under the guise of making things available for free. While they tell you that certain things are free (the few microfilms that they have available on-site at the FHC centers, for example), what they are not telling you is that a great deal of the projects that their free labor force is working on is not put online for free for everyone's benefit, it is turned over to for-profit companies such as ancestry and footnote. There are contracts between these various companies, and they have contracts with NARA. While some may not have a problem with giving their time for free, these companies are certainly not giving the records to the rest of us for free! This is BIG business, and their profits are so huge that they can even advertise on prime-time television, thanks to all the volunteers! They even bought rootsweb, which used to be free with no advertising allowed, so that they themselves could advertise and recruit more free labor force. As for the statement: "sometimes there's problems in the original record where someone didn't write something down right, but they're finding the accuracy to the record is above 90% the way they index." Who is "they" in this statement? Can you name some auditing firm that came up with this? I am certainly not finding that kind of accuracy rate in the auditing that I have done when comparing the original records or NARA microfilm to the online indexes and images. Do you really believe an accuracy rate that is made up by the very people who are selling the records to you? The reason that people think the images look so good online is because those are the only ones that get put online. As anyone who has worked with original records can tell you, many old documents are brown with age, or the ink is badly faded, or it has several different colors, making it difficult to copy in low-resolution black-and-white images and get all of it readable. When old microfilm gets scanned and put online, the image is degraded even further, rendering a lot of it unreadable. I have found many examples of this. Pension indexes, Southern Claims, and many other things put online and indexed by the subscription services using familysearch volunteers are missing large portions. In one case, I found the greater part of an entire roll of pension index microfilm missing from the online database at ancestry...because the roll was rather dark. Any very light or very dark cards did not scan. Anything not scanned does not get indexed, so you can't even know that it exists and order a copy from NARA. Approximately 30% of the cards on the NARA pension index microfilm magically disappeared when that database went online...though the database explanation at ancestry only says that 10% is "missing". NONE of it is "missing" on the NARA microfilm, they just didn't want to fool with adjusting anything or indexing images that they couldn't produce with the low-resolution scanning that they are using. It slows them down too much, so those records get left for dead. The better images that you enjoy online are generally the records that are scanned from original documents, generating high praise when no one sees any bad images online. As far as what's missing, well...you'll never know the difference, will you? No way for you to know that it ever existed, unless you look at the NARA microfilm or records yourself, which many people cannot do. The technology exists to scan originals in high-quality color images, in fact, several independent researchers bring their own portable (and inexpensive) color scanners into the research room at NARA and make their own scans that are far better than anything online. Familysearch is not doing this. At many repositories, including NARA, when a record group is microfilmed or scanned, it is then put in the vault and they do not allow anyone to request to see the originals any more. Thus, we are stuck with the low-resolution, poor quality black-and-white scans that are being put online, without the ability to look at the original. We are also stuck with the omissions. Some of what is being locked-up didn't even make it to the scans because it was too light or too dark. It's just gone forever. Some of us don't see this as a good thing! Especially since all of us, as taxpayers, own the federal records and the microfilm at NARA. We are already paying for it, and the law directs NARA to preserve it and make it available with free access to all. If the originals get locked up after scanning, and much of the faded documents don't scan, then we have lost our access to those valuable original records. To say that this is "preservation" is laughable. Thanks, volunteers, for working for free so we can be charged more and enrich one particular huge monopoly for the records that we all are supposed to already own under the law! If you think the glass is half full, perhaps it's because you are only seeing what is being put into the glass, you aren't seeing what's missing from the glass. I have seen both. If you really want to do volunteer work to help everyone get records online for free, there are many sites that you could upload your work to where you could honestly say it is free. AND, you would do well to order good copies from the courthouse or historical society that has taken care of them all these years, who deserve the income to offset their costs of upkeep and preservation. You don't have to go there in person to get copies of records in most cases. Peggy K. Reeves > [email protected] < > I am so sorry those discouraging words were posted about the use of Family History Centers for research.? Please disregard the negativity - the glass is more than half full, I assure you.? The films made available to all of us for very little cost are such a boon to serious genealogy research.<