Older Genealogists Hate Free Genealogy Sites
In the old days, before these new fangled computers and Googles and all, we had to trace our ancestry the REAL way. The real hard way – the way it should be! If you really want to know about your ancestors and make a ancestry research, well it should take you years of going through dusty court rooms and pressing rubbings on tombstones and travel with your feet and your books and not with all this clickety-clickety. Why, where’s the adventure in these free genealogy sites? Where’s the thrill of the hunt, I ask you? In my day, you had to be made of certain stuff to find anything on any member of your roots. Now any old fold and his brother can go to free genealogy sites and get the whole thing done for them. And they call this progress. HAH!
The Times They Are A-Changin’
It seems to be one of the instinctive questions we all need answering – “Where did I come from?” Part of discovering this answer is finding out your family history. Unless your family is incredibly rich and/or powerful, no one but your family is going to keep the old family stories alive. One of the places modern genealogists can use is free genealogy sites on the Internet.
Free genealogy sites are free mainly because they have ads around them. You get used to them, as you do with ads on the radio or television. Free genealogy sites are things our ancestors would’ve killed for, so honor your ancestors by not complaining about the ads. And take a peek at your family or your mother’s family or your adoptive parents’ family through free genealogy sites.
What They Use
Free genealogy sites are huge libraries of information that is being added to all of the time. Many have a lot of information from volunteers or genealogists. But a lot of the information on free genealogy sites are public records – the kind that are usually locked away in little town court houses that only are open to the public three days out of the year. Public records chronicle briefly the very dramatic events in your ancestors’ lives:
Marriage certificates
Birth records
Death certificates
Any property information or deeds
Legal transactions
Census records
Public phone books
Ellis Island passenger lists
With free genealogy sites, it’s now easier than ever to find out about your family tree genealogy. This is good news … for most people.
Date posted: Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 6:26 am | Under category: Family & Parenting
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Maybe I am not old enough (only 60), but I like free genealogical sites. I really hate sites that pretend to be free, but really cost something.
While much of what you say is true, geneaolgy still isn’t easy, if you want to know you are correct about your ancestors. The major problem is, that while much is available on the Internet, much of it is trash. Many of the sites that require subscriptions have no requirements for sourcing information, and most free ones publish anything they get. Quality control is a foreign concept! As a result, it is easy to get misled about your ancestors as there is no way to know if the data is accurate or not.
I recently found some of my old data published online which I had given to two family members, with the admonition that it hadn’t been properly checked. It didn’t stop them, they went right ahead and published it, errors and all. So you can be certain that much “data” is just not right on the Internet. It still takes lots of hard work to know the data is reliable.