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Archiver > ROOTSMAGIC-USERS > 2008-05 > 1210990542


From: Jon P Czarowitz <>
Subject: Re: [RMagic] Census fact
Date: Fri, 16 May 2008 19:15:42 -0700 (PDT)
In-Reply-To: <BAY138-DS43368CC229D852F977CE7CBC80@phx.gbl>


Jerry
I love the internet for its availability for research, but what was free on some sites before costs at least a membership now. Sites themselves have become paid sites including rootsweb since Ancestry took charge of it. I have nothing against Ancestry, but many of the things I found on the web as volunteer sites have become paid sites since Ancestry took control. I can not afford to rejoin each site I once found info for free so I urge keeping copies.
It is like going to a court house and finding your whole line thru deeds and certificates, and probates. I didn't make copies of originals, just notes. Got into an argument with a cousin about data, but I could not prove my point because the proof was in the court house that burned last month.
Records are important and preserving them is just as important. The court houses once had records for free. Now the transcribed records are only available for sale on cds or by subscription.
Nothing lasts forever, even paper or cds so the more we preserve for ourselves the better.
Have you tried to keep the images without links for the census. You don't have to link if you transcribe, but keeping a copy can prevent loss of future data. What happens if Ancestry goes down for some reason? Their fine print warns that there is no guarantee of availability and so does all sites on the internet. I guess the reason is the same one we kept those file cabinets full of paper, only the disks are easier to store now.
Jon P Czarowitz
CCUSA National Genealogist
TX - RootsMagic Users Network
http://www.clancunninghamusa.org



--- On Fri, 5/16/08, Jerry Bryan <> wrote:

> From: Jerry Bryan <>
> Subject: Re: [RMagic] Census fact
> To:
> Date: Friday, May 16, 2008, 9:16 AM
> This has been a great discussion. I have sort of a
> contrarian question about one piece of the discussion, as
> is sometimes my wont.
>
> Why keep copies of census images locally when your source
> for the images is ancestry.com? If you need to look the
> images up again, they are still there on ancestry.com where
> you found them in the first place.
>
> Before online resources starting becoming so ubiquitous, I
> dutifully made copies on paper of any census data I found
> at the library, whether what I was able to find was
> transcriptions in a book or original census images on
> microfilm. And I dutifully had filing cabinets full of all
> that paper, all cataloged and sorted and arranged so I could
> find it again. With things going online, I find I'm
> moving my paper filing cabinet more and more to the
> computer, including lots of images of lots of things.
> Those images have to be managed, sorted, indexed, and
> backed up because I don't want to lose anything if I
> have a computer crash.
>
> For data that's hard to come by, it's worth the
> effort to sort, manage, index, and backup my images and
> other computerized versions of the data. And I do a lot of
> that. I have lots of images, and I point RM to my images.
> But I don't point RM to images of the census because I
> don't keep any images of the census. Instead, with
> ancestry.com I now personally transcribe all the census
> images I'm interested in and I no longer use anybody
> else's transcriptions. I include my transcriptions as
> notes in census facts. And on those occasions where I want
> to review the images again, I just look them up again at
> ancestry.com. Census images are now very easy to come by,
> and it saves a lot of work not to have to store them,
> manage them, and back them up.
>
> As a point in passing, I really like the fact that images
> can be associated in RM both with sources and with
> citations. When an image is associated with a source, any
> time you use that source you immediately have the link to
> the image and no extra work is required to make the link
> available to you. However, I think citations have a
> weakness in this area. You can associate an image with a
> citation, and you can copy and paste the citation. But if
> you copy and paste the citation, the link to the image is
> not copied and pasted along with the rest of the citation.
> I've posted a request to fix this to the official Wish
> List, and I hope it's fixed in version 4. I'm
> assuming that others of you all who use a lot of images in
> RM would also like to see this fixed.
>
> Jerry Bryan
>
>




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