In our captialist, free market economy, about the only thing you can get at no cost is the air. So, go to NARA and get some free records. If you want them on paper, you'll have to pay because paper costs money and so do the microfilm readers and the copiers. Oh, you want the information available on the internet. Well, the stuff you seek is not in digital format.
Somebody has to put it in digital format.
They want money to transcribe it because it is very time consuming. This same information which is now in digital format has to sit somewhere that is accessible via the internet before you can have free access to it. That costs money and if the information is worth a darn, many people will want to access it simultaneously. The relative wealth of information available today is the result of hundreds of thousands of hours of difficult work. This information site on perhaps thousands of computers.