Ancestry/Genealogy

without using Ancestry to any great extent. I had a 3 month membership to Ancestry several years back -- before they did their automatic renewal. I let it drop after the 3 months. In the beginning, I went to the library every Saturday and stayed from when they opened until when they closed. The Seattle Public Library has a very good genealogy section. A lot of the public records (birth, death, marriage) were obtained by letter, enclosing a check "not to exceed" a specific dollar amount. I've taken a couple of long road trips in pursuit of graveyards, libraries, courthouses. One trip was about 7,000 miles in 30 days and I did it by myself. Then for a while, state records were becoming available on-line -- until Ancestry made a deal and now those records are behind a pay-wall. The Social Security Death Index used to be easily available but now is behind pay-walls, not only with Ancestry but with other sites as well. If I really need to check on a record that I can't find through other means, I can use Ancestry at our local library for free. Our local library also has World Vital Records available from home computer for free. I use that for Census work.

There are websites that contain results of research that I would have never been able to do myself either because of the overseas travel require and/or lack of language skills to decipher. For example, for old English (or other European) records, I use www.ourfamilytree.org. What I particularly like about that site is that people who submit information do so on a collaborative basis so there is only one entry per individual. Not like Ancestry or Rootsweb where there are a dozen entries for one person, often with conflicting information. I can't tell you the number of times on Ancestry or Rootsweb, the parent is listed as being born 20 years AFTER the child. I even saw one where the parents, both mother and father, were listed as born over 80 years before the child. The information is obviously wrong, but it's posted anyway. You have to be very careful about using information from either site, unless the entry is accompanied by a link to a supporting document. This is particularly true if one is up-loading strings of information from either site. I've used Mocavo, but as you said, documents are behind a pay-wall.

And, when researching titled families of Europe, I find that Wikipedia has bios of a lot of them. And, as a last resort, using Google at least reveals other people working on the same lines. All in all, there is so much on-line that it keeps me entertained several hours each day.