What else is there besides ancestry.com?

Question

I know it is the most common but if there are any other things that are the same but less expensive, I would love to try them. I especially need census look-ups but would love ideas of anything more affordable than ancestry.com.

Uhura

Answer 1

Genes reunited!

Answer 2

If you go to your local public library to do the research, you can access all of the census records for free. You can also use all of the newspaper archives, ethnic databases and (in many cases) even use Ancestry.com for free.

Answer 3

Some basic economics here - if you could get a 5-star meal meal delivered to your door, for free, all of the restaurants in town would go out of business. Ancestry is still in business; ergo there isn't anything as good for free.

Rootsweb is wonderful. The US Gen Web is wonderful. Some USGW county sites have some census transcriptions for some townships for some years. The number of people willing to transcibe census listings for free is less than the number who are willing to do it for money, and Ancestry charges for access to recoup its investment.

GenForum has a forum for most surnames, every country, every state in the US and Canada, every shire/county in the USA and UK. Ancestry does too, and they are part of its free section. GF tends to lump Clark and Clarke together, Ancestry to separate them, so GF has fewer forums but they are bigger.

Cyndi's list has 250,000 sites; some are oddball, like Huguenot.com, or the Germans form Russia. Some are more general.

Everyone should have the LDS site in their favorites.

If you want advice but no data,

http://www.tedpack.org/genhead.html

is wonderful.

Answer 4

There are others, and Ancestry doesn't cover ALL censuses that are available online (if you're Scottish, for instance, there's a wonderful page: www.schotlandspeople.com, I think -- it's a fee-site, but reasonable), but its census images are good and the coverage (unlike Heritage Quest) is EXCELLENT.  

You might want to check at your local public library to see if either of these databases are available there -- usually for free.  I know both are available at the Baltimore County Public Libraries, for example.