Michael John Neill operates a great genealogy site, called RootDig. He has hosted many things on the site, but one of his most popular offerings has been images from census records, World War I draft registrations, passenger manifests, and other records that showed famous people. He openly stated that the images were obtained from Ancestry.com, and then he gave a lot of publicity to Ancestry.com besides.
I wrote about RootDig.com several times; you can find my past articles at http://tinyurl.com/359jyn. Now The Generations Network (TGN), parent company of Ancestry.com, has "requested" that Michael eliminate the images downloaded from Ancestry from his web site.
The following words are now displayed at http://www.rootdig.com/famouscensus.html:
Famous Census Pages - ever wonder what the rich and famous said when the censustaker came knocking? You can no longer find out here!
The new marketing staff at The Generations Network made me remove the images we formerly hosted on this site. The phrases "legal action" and "hear from legal department "were used. The pages clearly contained links to Ancestry, indicated where the images had been obtained, and indicated the value a subscription had for the average person.
Until I have time to view the NARA film myself and re-obtain the images, they will not be posted on this site.
Randy Seaver has written some interesting thoughts on the subject. You can read his words at http://randysmusings.blogspot.com/2007/05/posting-record-images-from-ancestrycom.html
