Monday, May 07, 2007

Ancestry.com Images Removed From My Blog

After reading that Ancestry.com has "requested" that Michael John Neill remove images of famous people enumerated in the censuses from his blog, I decided I had better do likewise. Last month I started a series of posts entitled "Ancestors in the 1930 U.S. Federal Census," with snippets of images of my direct ancestors, along with human interest-type information that I thought would be fun for my readers to know. I also included some of the difficulties I had come up against in searching for these ancestors in that census. I'll continue to keep these posts up and I hope to complete the series, but it will be without the images, I'm afraid. I can find them at HeritageQuest Online, but somehow they download differently than Ancestry.com's (haven't figured it out, yet!), and I'm not sure if I'll be violating their terms of use if I use HQ's images on my blog.

This recent issue, along with The Generations Network's insistence that FreeOnAncestry.com be removed, has not endeared this corporation to my heart lately, nor to many other genealogists as well. I repeatedly see comments from other genea-bloggers such as "shooting themselves in the foot" or "cutting off their nose to spite their face." I wrote quite some time ago about how angry patrons were when the "new, improved" site came out and was such a bear to navigate...even though there was no outcry for an "improvement" before the change! Is anyone listening out there?

2 comments:

Bill Blunt said...

It's a shame when a company like A.com get so uppity about a few images. I've found myself visiting their site less and less these days - the adverts they've recently introduced don't help.
Kind Regards
THJnr

Brian said...

I can sorta see where they're coming from the FreeOnAncestry.com thing. I mean, he is using their domain name and telling people how to get free things that they offer. Do I agree with it? Not really, but I do see the logic.

Also, you mentioned that you can't save the images from the other site. Have you tried hitting "PrintScreen" (or "Prt Sc" on some keyboards)? This will take the screen and put a copy in the clipboard that you can then paste into any graphics program, such as Microsoft Paint or Photoshop, etc.