Person talk:Mary Haynes (5)

Adding a link to AmericanAncestors.org if great but do not remove the link to Ancestry.com for the will because most people only have access to the later. [posted by RolandHenryBakerIII]

For this particular page the link is free to non-members so accessible to everyone. Even to people with Ancestry accounts. As explained elsewhere, links to Ancestry are essentially ads for Ancestry which seems inappropriate for a non-profit organization, and completely unusable, for non-members. It isn't even useful for institutional accounts without playing with the URL, which non-techie people might not realize. They don't tell where the source was taken from (how descriptive is "Massachusetts, Wills and Probate Records, 1635-1991 Original data: Massachusetts County, District and Probate Courts."? not very since probate files are organized by county in Massachusetts and the county isn't specified), so the person can't even pursue potential alternate repositories they may know about. So in effect, you are posting a link to people that have access to the item, and may well know about it, but excluding the people they most need it, those that don't have access. --Jrich 16:39, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

I didn't notice this link was to a free database. I was assuming it was from a paid database on AmericanAncestors.org. I thought it was only on their paid database. So in this case deleting the ancestry.com link and substituting this link was entirely appropriate. My apologies. Mea culpa! Feel free to substitute links in link kind to free sources anytime.

AmericanAncestors.org is a paid site as well so we could consider it advertising for them as well although it is non-profit. I think it is hardly unacceptable to cite sources on Ancestry.com on werelate.org. It has some sources you can find no place else and this is a genealogy site. If we go by that notion we couldn't cite any published books because they are sold for profit including many books published with vital records, deeds and probate abstracts or indexes. But that wasn't the point of this post.