Ancestry.com lawsuit says it owns Pennsylvania's digital records
Spotlight PA link: https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2023/12/ancestry-genealogy-pennsylvania-historical-records-court-fight/
That question has pitted a New York City-based professional genealogist against the Pennsylvania agency in charge of a vast array of historical documents and artifacts, as well as Ancestry.com, an online genealogy company used by millions of people to search for family and other records.
The genealogist is Alec Ferretti, a director at Reclaim The Records, a nonprofit that pushes governments to make genealogical information more broadly available. The state agency is the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC), which in 2008 contracted with Ancestry to digitize a sweeping list of historical documents and make them available on the company’s website. Those records also include naturalization documents, prison records, and Civil War border claims and muster rolls, according to the contract.
Those digitized records, according to PHMC’s website, are free to Pennsylvania residents who create a user profile with Ancestry. Ferretti, however, isn’t a Pennsylvania resident.
Holy moley, this is a mess. These digital records could end up in the hands of malevolent groups like Cambridge Analytica (which no longer exists) or who knows ... !?
The contract with Ancestry.com needs to be ended immediately. Let Pennsylvania take over maintaining its own public historic data.
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The Commonwealth failed to establish who owns the data, when they hired Ancestry to maintain the archive. Now that we know how stuff like this can be abused for political reasons, we need to carefully preserve the data, and keep it safe.
The state department hired Ancestry.com back in 2008 in order to save money on hiring more employees to do this work, now they're really in a bind. This lawsuit brings it all out in the open.
As far as obituaries, they're available to everyone even if they aren't subscribers to the publication. However there's normally a time limit, as you say, maybe a year, maybe 5 or 10 years, for how long a searcher has free access.
The data available in Ancestry.com goes far beyond that. It includes military service records as far back as the Civil War, birth, marriage and death records, and many other items that are considered "public records."
What if someone among your ancestors was a member of the Communist Party? What if a great-great-grandfather was hung for a capital crime? Would you want that to be traceable? There are all kinds of questions and privacy issues.