With the possible exceptions of Ancestry’s OneWorldTree and FamilySearch’s IGI, the “Search for Famous Relatives, was the biggest piece of junkology ever inflicted on the net and the fact that it is gone is cause for great rejoicing among serious genealogical researchers – would that Ancestry would also do the same with OneWorldTree.

It has been a joy to find those and unearth substantial family information.

For example, my maternal line is mostly from Wabash and Kosciusko counties of Indiana. So I was initially excited to see the database listed above as “Wabash Valley, Indiana, Obituaries 1910-2000″. Unfortunately, when you actually do a search in that database, you find that every match just links to a search page at the Vigo Co Indiana Library site, where you have to reenter your search expression, because it doesn’t even populate the library’s form with your names.

http://www.vigo.lib.in.us/obituaries

And the results are just an index with the name and age of the deceased and the date and newspaper that the obit was printed in. The actual obituaries are not online, and to order one you need to send $5 to the library. Since I have literally thousands of maternal relatives in the Wabash Valley, I’m not going to be sending in thousands of $5 fees to request all those obits. The near relatives I already have obits for, and there’s no good basis for prioritizing which of the distant relatives is more important to order an obit for than another.

So while it’s certainly better than not adding any new databases, it’s not nearly as impressive as the list first appears.

BY FAR the biggest gap in online genealogy are deeds, wills and estate records, which are often the best resources for tracing families before 1850. One still needs to resort to microfilms for most of that entire category. I’d really like to see more effort put into expanding the offerings in that area, with an every name index (not just the name of the deceased or the grantor/grantee.)

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I didn’t like it but hadn’t realized what a bad move that actually was as far as PR.
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Considering that Ancestry has almost doubled the subscriber base (914,000 at end of 2008 to approx 1,700,000+ projected at end of 2011) I really can’t see where it was a bad PR move at all.

Annalea, I agree. I’ve been a paying subscriber for 6 years but have not renewed my yearly subscription this year. The collection of FamilySearch websites (which still have some things more easily found on labs.familysearch.org for which I prefer the organization of) is getting better all the time. I am an indexer there but I would never index for Ancestry.com.

Andy, I hope no one at Ancestry.com is paying attention to your stupid idea of making it a subscription only site. It’s bad enough their “public” trees aren’t “public” anymore and, being a paying member all these years, I didn’t like it but hadn’t realized what a bad move that actually was as far as PR. It reminds me of changes to the message system making it for paying customers only.

I will be moving my trees to Rootsweb and leaving only a skeletal tree on Ancestry for people to find and contact me. If it ever becomes a subscription-only site I will remove everything.

If I need to see some records only Ancestry.com has, I will only subscribe for the shortest amount of time necessary to retrieve those records. My new attitude is a direct result of their changes over the last 6 years and I really, really doubt they will inspire the kind of loyalty they used to have from their many long time members.

A drastic increase in subscribers by decreasing subscription rates is self-defeating as it would incur additional expense to buy the servers and improve the infrastructure to service all those new subscribers. The present subscribers know that the system is already straining to keep up.

You idea *might* work if Ancestry became a subscription only site, getting rid of the non-paying members would certainly lessen the load on the servers – as well as rid us of the namegathering treebies Ancestry is afflicted with.