As others have pointed out, FamilySearch will be indexing the records and making them available for free. It's a massive effort involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers plus a large investment in technology and other resources:
By comparison, Ancestry (now owned by Blackstone Inc.) will charge money to access these public records ... and this comes on heels of jacking up subscription prices across the board, up to 25% (https://www.ancestry.com/corporate/blog/were-increasing-our-...)
MyHeritage is also indexing 1950 records, but these will be paywalled like Ancestry.
my public library has a subscription to both myheritage and ancestry.com and allow for most records to be obtained for free. check if yours has a similar program.
edit: what you should be doing if you do have public library access to these sites, is you should be saving your records locally using software like Gramps or Zotero. Maybe both? I'm still learning the ecosystem but good genealogists depend on documentation, and documentation worth having is the documentation you keep safe locally.
While it is true that there are some records that are not available online, it has little to do with being Mormon.
Usually it means the data is still only available on a microfiche and has to be viewed in-person.
The only exception to this rule is that FamilySearch has paid partnerships with a few organizations to aggregate their information. The LDS (Mormon) church only pays for church members to have access to that aggregated information. Non-church members have to get their own subscriptions.
> They're not viewable because they only permit Mormons to view them.
Do you have a source for that? I'm not a Mormon, and can use the site without restriction, including viewing records from other countries. The site does not ask questions about religious affiliation when registering.
Regarding indexing: For some types of documents it's incomplete or the volunteer crew hasn't gotten around to it. I always check the original image when it's presented to get extra details.
For what it's worth, Ancestry has similar problems in its own index and the way it organizes some data. Some records are not viewable at all, just a very high-level index entry that reads more like a footnote.
LDS research centers are open to anyone regardless of religion. Some records are digitized but have access restricted to the research centers; others may be only available on paper or microfiche.
> FamilySearch has unique records from the Philippines related to my wife's (long lost) family that are indexed but not viewable.
I pay out the nose for Ancestry.com and also come across indexed data that isn't viewable. I suspect this is because the data was literally only indexed and not archived (yet?) photographically. Possibly the digital index was copied from a handwritten index, without access to the original documents. Fortunately for me all such data I've come across has been redundant, except for some Missouri marriage record data with conflicting dates--both sets of data were just from indices; the original records aren't viewable, which in this case I assumed--without evidence--was due to some privacy concerns given the records are from the 1960s.
> FamilySearch is the worst of the 3 big genealogy websites.
It's free! Plus, there's little I've been able to find on Ancestry.com and not FamilySearch. I think in one or two instances FamilySearch actually had better data. And on many occasions FamilySearch's presentation of data was easier to grok, making it easier to sift through data during the initial stages of a hunt.
A big pro for Ancestry.com is definitely non-U.S. databases, but at least in my case those databases are only relevant past 3-4 generations, at which point it becomes very difficult (at least for myself as an amateur) to have any confidence in associations without independent corroboration. (You'd be surprised how often names and dates line up coincidentally. In one case I found two candidate families where in addition to the parents 3 children in each family had the same names and similar birth years. It took me countless hours of sleuthing to be able to confidently rule one of the families out.) If you already have that extra bit of information, though, then the databases lose a little of their unique value. (Definitely worth it if you're serious, but most people aren't as invested as they think.) IME, the best value proposition of Ancestry.com is its popularity. There are multiple connections and facts I never would have been able to discover, let alone confirm, without information from family trees published on Ancestry.com. Specifically, trees from people in possession of physical records, or die-hard sleuths who traveled to tiny villages across the world to photograph religious records not available anywhere else. There are very few people who are willing and capable of putting in that sort of work (almost everybody simply copies subtrees from each other, which is a very dangerous thing to do if you care about accuracy--errors propagate like wildfire). Because of it's popularity you'll find more of those people on Ancestry.com than elsewhere.
I'm sorry you feel that way. What records are you looking for?
Here's a page describing the available genealogical records from the Philippines and where you can find them: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Philippines_Online_Gene... In some cases, FamilySearch may have only the indexed (textual) data, and commercial providers may charge for access to the images.
FamilySearch has contracts with some of those commercial providers to grant church members free accounts, which I think is what ianhawes is describing. General access in those cases is available from the providers at their usual rates.
https://climbingmyfamilytree.blogspot.com/p/1950-census.html
One of the more interesting optional annotations: Enumerators could note if they thought the respondent was lying, and write down what they thought the truth was! (https://climbingmyfamilytree.blogspot.com/2020/01/extra-nota...)
As others have pointed out, FamilySearch will be indexing the records and making them available for free. It's a massive effort involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers plus a large investment in technology and other resources:
https://www.familysearch.org/en/info/1950-census-details
By comparison, Ancestry (now owned by Blackstone Inc.) will charge money to access these public records ... and this comes on heels of jacking up subscription prices across the board, up to 25% (https://www.ancestry.com/corporate/blog/were-increasing-our-...)
MyHeritage is also indexing 1950 records, but these will be paywalled like Ancestry.