Do you lot on the genealogy forum get fed up with people wanting free sites. I say if they want it that?

Question

much they would be prepared to pay, I do and thousands of others do.

Answer 1

I pay to do my genealogy, but if in the past if had not been for some lovely people on sites which you do pay for ,and I at that time was a non paying member; I would not have found my natural half brothers and sisters.

I now don't mind helping people who are just starting out. If we were all selfish in this world it would be so sad. Its nice to do a kindness occasionally.

Answer 2

To be honest, I don't fault anyone for wanting free sites. Heck, I want them too; however people have to realize that you can only go so far with free sites and you can only go so far with the internet. Genealogy is not easy and it is not cheap! I have an untold amount of money tied up in my research. I have a couple of different pay site memberships and I have gotten a lot of good information from them, but the lions share of the genealogical information is in books and records at different repositories. Genealogy is a hobby that one has to do a lot of leg work and spend a lot of time to document, so often there is a lot more tied up in researching your ancestry than just money, making it just that much more meaningful.

Many of the people asking for the FREE sites are new to genealogy and learn right away that they are not able to just pull up a full ten generation pedigree complete with source information. (If only it were that easy!) There is no harm in trying the free sites but one has to be realistic in their expectations on the information that they will glean from them.

Answer 3

I do get fed up with people asking that question, but it doesn't stop me offering help, if I think I can help that is. I just love genealogy, and I really do hope to become a genealogist one day, but till then I will keep practising.
I have to say though that I wish the questions were a bit more challenging don't you.

Answer 4

There are several considerations:
1) this informations is "PUBLIC" information (why not get it for free?) Of course, they can, if they know where to look! Of course, it will cost them in time, if not money. (Can you imagine flying to Europe to search through records, or even to Salt Lake City?)
2) unfortunately, paying for the information (as on www.ancestry.com) doesn't make the information any more accurate. I found ancestors that supposedly were born in New York in 1584! Others were born 60 - 70 years BEFORE their parents!

Answer 5

Not everyone can afford to. Some of us have expensive memberships to sites that we feel we want to get better use out of so don't mind doing a few look ups. There are a lot of good free sites, but if you cannot find what you are looking for when you have actually paid- chances are reduced by expecting to find it for free.

Answer 6

How's that go ... You can't always get what you want, but if you try, you might get what you need.

Some folks are maybe too programmed to the socialist handout with no thought of where Stuff comes from. There ain't no genealogy faerie. Yer mama don't work here.

Answer 7

The free web sites are just pointers to the data, you should always go back to the original sources, that is one of the first things I learnt when I started, and most of us doing our family trees give the info away for free anyway.

Answer 8

There are people who have heard someone say that they know some that found their family on a website. What they don't understand is not everyone's family is on a website and a lot of the information in them needs to be verified. Much is not accurate.

Answer 9

There are a lot of good free sites, and it is good to get all the information off those before paying out any money needlessly. if you really need to unload some money, why not send it to me and feel better?

Answer 10

I also pay,though sometimes I think that some websites charge an exorbitant amount.