Dick Eastman’s Complaint About Genealogists

Dick Eastman has a complaint about many genealogists.

I am appalled that some people apparently expect a company to spend money gathering free records, spend money scanning it, spend money building data centers, spend money buying servers and disk farms, spend money on high-speed Internet connectivity, spend money for programmers, spend money on customer support personnel, and spend money on advertising to let you know that the information is available, and then expect that same company to make the information available free of charge! [..] Where did they learn economics? At the Tooth Fairy University?

I agree. Genealogy is cheaper today than it ever has been. Physically going to retrieve a single record from a remote repository can be very expensive.

My pet peeve it slightly different– the “paid record lookup” requests. As Judy G. Russell eloquently points out, just say no. In most cases you are violating the terms of service you agreed to and the lost revenue means fewer records for those of us happy to hand over subscription dollars.