To put the cost for a copy of a page from the 1921 census (which includes copies of other pages and documents listed under "Extra Materials") in context, I have today paid TNA a few pence short of £60 to make high quality copies of, and email me seven pages of a document in their collection. That doesn't include the initial fee of £8.50 I paid before Christmas for them to find the document and assess it's suitability for copying. I make that roughly £9.50 per page. Yes, viewing the documents would be free if I took time and trouble to visit TNA in person, neither of which I am inclined to do at present. If I had done so, I would have been able to sit in front of the document and take notes, but even if they allowed me to photograph it, my images would bear no comparison to the service I am paying for. I paid TNA quite a lot more than that a while ago for a copy of a will probated in the Shanghai Supreme Court.
Another example: transcripts of parish records held by Essex Record Office are held by Ancestry, and therefore free to subscribers. The images of the original documents however, are not. I can access them for free by visiting ERO in Chelmsford should I wish, but I choose for convenience to pay them £95 for an annual subscription to access them from the comfort of my own home. I also have an order currently pending with ERO for copies of documents in their possession which have not been digitised and are not otherwise available from them or anywhere else.
Last month I paid the Marine History Archive 40 Canadian Dollars to search an archive in their collection and confirm (the absence of) an individual in a particular record on a specific date.
If I want to view and download or copy original documents, and sometimes even transcripts, I find that some may be available on FindMyPast and I need a subscription to view them, Others that are not on FindMyPast may be available at Ancestry. Ditto The Genealogist etc. I can also find many of those collections elsewhere without having to take out a subscription to any of those companies, but I still have to pay for many of them. Local family history societies will charge me for copies of CDs or USB pens containing the information which, by their agreements with FindMyPast or Ancestry, I could also obtain from those providers with a subscription. Others, which are often also on one of the major subscription sites, I can purchase from specialist genealogical database suppliers, per item or part thereof.
Why should anyone think they have an entitlement to free access to anything, just because they have paid a subscription to a third party whose agreement with the original repository, and conditions for copying, hosting and permitting access will all vary according to the repository or type of material concerned, and other arrangements? As TNA explain on their website, "As a government department, we are obliged to charge for some of our public services, including research and record copying. The prices we charge for some of our services are set out by the Fees Regulations under the Public Records Act (1958) and are based on recovering the costs of providing these services. Digitising paper records is costly, and normally involves additional cataloguing and transcription work to ensure that the records are searchable. When we decide to digitise a collection of records, we either work with commercial and academic publishing partners or we do the work ourselves and make digital copies available to download from our website through Discovery".
FindMyPast made a successful bid to digitise and transcribe the 1921 Census under the terms as described above. As a business, they will have a business model which takes account of how much their bid will have cost them and how much to charge for access to the collection to either recover or mitigate some of the cost of that process. They aren't a charity. If they or another commercial partner hadn't become involved in transcribing and digitising the census, we would be paying TNA directly for copies at a similar cost to that I have quoted above.
But if we want to view them for free, we can. Don't go through FindMyPast. Just visit TNA, the Manchester Library or the National Library of Wales
