Access to paid websites
Do you think it's fair for church members to get free access to paid websites and not allow anyone else access? I don't think so. Looks like church members are being rewarded unfairly. Sorry but that's the way it looks to the rest of us.
Answers
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints partners with Ancestry.com. They exchange mutually beneficial information and projects. Part of that partnership is to provide free access to ancestry.com by members of the church.
The public can access this free service in a Family History Center in their area or at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.
We appreciate that you asked this question and hope that you will continue to use FamilySearch, which is free to everyone, as you research your family.
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I'm not LDS either, but I disagree with your assessment.
First of all, the fact that other people have access to a site doesn't deny anyone else's access. It's not a book with only one copy in the library.
How other people access a paid site -- by paying, by some organization they belong to paying, by accessing it from a location that paid -- is not relevant to you. All of the big for-pay genealogy sites offer periodic discounts and other promotions, and many of them offer institutional subscriptions or similar forms of semi-public access. Take advantage of these.
Be thankful for Family Search. The data available from this site is absolutely incredibly VAST, and I continually marvel that it is all completely free of charge. Yes, it's annoying to encounter the camera-with-key on things I want to look at, but not all of those have anything to do with the LDS church.
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