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Re: If you are planning to change Ancestry. com subscriptions....

 

Ancestry.com was founded by genealogists, and is still staffed by genealogists. However, Blackstone does own a majority stake, and thus they do make many major decisions. As long as Americans continue to accept that corporations exist solely to make profits for shareholders, this is how the system will run.?

It was not always like this--corporations used to have to justify their existence?to the state where they incorporated, by showing how their business helped the citizens of that state. This is a decision that we the people can change. Ralph Nader spent much of his career trying to get the profit motive reduced, without much success.

Selling DNA kits does not make companies money--that is what has brought 23andMe to bankrupcy. They have to provide services that people will continue to pay for to be profitable. 23andMe didn't look ahead, read the tea leaves. and provide those services to us genealogists. We could have kept it afloat, had they served us well.

Ancestry does not get most of their datasets for free. They either have to invest, as they did to index the 1950 Census to us in record time, or they have to buy or lease them. If we want them to continue to provide that for us, we'll have to pay for it. I can afford it, so I'm happy to do that.

FamilySearch makes it look like it can be done for free. However, they are run by a church, so they have cash and labor contributions behind them to keep the value coming. By improving their FS Family Tree, we are contributing. Again, because it's free, I think my work there is worth it, and I am not a church member. It is volunteers who do all the microfilming, by the way.?

The other source of information to us is our governments; they are supported by our tax dollars, along with some volunteer work. For instance, my state of Washington has wonderful digital archives, and volunteers do a great deal of the indexing.?

So all of it costs something to somebody!

Valorie


On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 4:10?PM Ken Doughty via <sbdfhs=[email protected]> wrote:
Ancestry is owned by Blackstone, which is an asset accumulation and investment company, which, until Ukraine, loaned money to Russia. It claims it no longer does so.
It has one goal - to make obscene amounts of money.
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When Ancestry came on the market it was seen as a very profitable cash cow so they bought it.
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Their only interest in family history is to do enough to encourage people to join and test their DNA so they can keep the profits up.
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This is as reported by various sources who have checked out the motives of Ancestry.

--
she/her. "Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them." -?Marcus Aurelius
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