Does anyone know of any free sites to find stuff on family members dead or alive?

Question

I am working on a family tree. and i dont think its right for a person to charge money to get info on ones info on there own family. now its one thing if someone wants to pay to have the info mailed to you. but i dont i just wanna see it so i can write it down on my own and most of the records are suposed to be public any ways so y charge someone for it.

now i have used ancestry.com as much as i could and i have also used rootsweb.com some but couldent find much

Answer 1

You are not paying for the info.  You are paying for the access to the info.  The info is public record, but access is not guaranteed.  Secondly, as Shirley said, to get the records, it cost someone money to do all the work for you, traveling, digging through tons of records, scanning the copies, transcribing and indexing them, etc.  So if they had to pay the expenses of doing all that to get the records so they could put them on the internet where YOU could get access to them MUCH more easily from the comfort of your own home, then why shouldn't you have to pay them some so they can recoup the cost of their expenses?  Get over it.

Ancestry has TONS of stuff.  Either you do not know what you are doing and are not searching right, or you are not utilizing the site to its full extent.  Still, with all they have, even they do not have everything.  You may still find that at times you will have to do research the more costly, more time consuming old fashioned way by going to various places to dig them up yourself.

And, there are over 400,000 genealogy sites.  If you only limited yourself to 2 of them, then it is no wonder you didn't find everything you are looking for.

Also, you will find very little if anything on living people on any genealogy site as it is unethical to post personal information on living people on any site.  There are a few exceptions, like perhaps old census records.  I found my grandmother, who was born in 1919 and is still living, on the 1920 and 1930 census records.  No census records after 1930 have been released to the public yet.

Answer 2

Let me explain something. There are websites with records.  It has cost them money to obtain those records and to set up the website and pay employees to maintain the websites. Therefore it is fair that they charge people.  The records are free if you want to travel to courthouses all over the country and search through their records.  You will have GASOLINE  expense, motel or hotel expense, and eating out expense.  So, if you can find some of your family's records online of a paid website, which route do you think is cheaper.  

I think Ancestry.Com is the best for its records online.  If it is too pricey, your public library might have a subscription to it.

Just don't take as absolute fact everything you see in family trees on their website or  ANY website, free or paid.  The information is subscriber submitted and mostly not documented.  Even when you see the same information repeatedly by many different subscribers that is no guarantee at all it is correct. A lot of people copy without verifying.  The information can be useful as CLUES as to where to get the documentation.

Edit:  I think you are confusing family trees with records.  Family trees are submitted by the subscribers but not necessarily the records.  

If you have a family member who has worked to do your family tree. They have traveled all over the country getting the information, paid for vital records, copies of wills, deeds, etc. (personnel at county and state offices who produce the copies for a person,  have to be paid salaries),

you have no right to think that family member should turn over what that have obtained to you.  If they have had a book published they have a right to feel you should buy their book.   I don't mind sharing my information, but many do.  

However, the records like Ancestry.Com has are not subscriber submitted.  They have paid people to obtain them. They have paid people to transcribe them. They also have many original images of records as well as the transcriptions. Now, there are errors in the transcriptions but when you look at the original images you can understand if you were doing the transcriptions you would make some.  

Now, you might be able to view all the census images for free at your public library but you don't have the convenience of doing so from your own home.  Your public library hasn't transcribed them and indexed them all so you can find people more easily.   Ancestry.Com has.

Now, your county, state etc could put all the records on line and transcribe them for you but that means the taxpayer would be paying for it and many might resent it since they aren't interested in genealogy.