I have to agree and commiserate with you about using the internet beginning 
in the early 1990's.  I trusted everyone, was just delighted to make contact 
with family, however remote. As time went on it was obvious there were 
"users" out there.  I stepped back, became more protective of myself, and 
started going back to my old ways......the library, courthouses, cemetery 
walks, etc.  I do still think that basic contact with people can knock down 
walls.  I still use the internet to search for contacts.  I, just this 
morning looked up a man in the archives of Pope Co., Illinois and went to 
"Anywho" for a phone number.  I called his office and await getting an email 
or phone call from him.
  When my mother's cousin mentioned she had the King bible, I never dreamed 
she had birthdates, deathdates, marriages of family members back to 1793. 
She had not a clue who some of these folks were, but upon investigation we 
found they were direct ancestors and their many branches of their tree. I 
put it online and people came out of the woodwork! It was the first new 
information about this particular family in over a hundred years. This 
branch had been "lost".  I still have contact with many of those "first" 
researchers who shared family with me and vice versa.  We are deeply and 
firmly reunited family. Some I have never met face to face, and some have 
died leaving me so empty because they filled that spot in my family and my 
heart.
 On another subject, I research my family and have done so since I was 17 
years old, I am now 64. I do it out of love for the history of this country 
and love of my family.  We are one of "those" families who still has several 
annual family reunions to stay connected.  I would savor the opportunity to 
walk down that country road with my gggg-grandfather James King, ask him 
what he most enjoyed in this life, why he was here and what he hoped for his 
family. For me, genealogy is understanding history, relating my family to a 
timeline and looking at my grandchildren and wondering if they look like 
their ggggg-grandmother. It  doesn't matter in the end that they have little 
interest in this history, it does matter that some day when I am gone, they 
will have an interest and be grateful that grandma wrote it down. 

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