I have to disagree about Ancestry. I pay for their full membership, and it
costs $.81 a day, less than I'd pay for a cup of coffee. HeritageQuest does
have scanned census records, and they are free at many libraries. The
drawback is that they are not complete, they do not have an index for 1850,
and the other indexes are for head of household only. Ancestry/s indexes are
far from perfect, but they have wonderful search engines for the census that
allow you to search with Soundex, wild card, first name only, place of
birth, age range, etc., and their indexes are for every name, not just
heads.

---
Ann Avery Hunter
Winston-Salem, NC


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Drake" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 4:28 PM
Subject: [VA-ROOTS] FYI; Family search online


> Ancestry's prices are no less than obscene.  Then too, what you will not
> be
> told is that Ancestry.com probably has less than 5% of the total records
> available to you for research.  If you searched every single record and
> source they peddle on-line, you a) still will not know of the thousands of
> records that they do not have, and b) will find that they will not reveal
> that the greatest part of their information is not acceptable as evidence
> to
> any organization or responsible genealogist of whom I have knowledge.
>
> Your best sources are Heritage Quest, the Allen County Public Library,
> Library of the City of New York, the NARA, the vast sources of the LDS
> (Mormons), the many sources posted by responsible organizations and
> universities that are free and as reliable as any, and the sources listed
> and the information in the newsletters of the state societies and of the
> small societies that exist where any particular ancestor lived - the
> "where"
> of that person.

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