Great thread to revive! I am a genealogy buff and have traced my family and my husband’s back as far as each main line will go (for me that means 1300s Germany and for him it’s 1300s Wales) and between us we have a Nuremberg Renaissance scholar who was best friends with “Praying Hands” painter Albrecht Durer, a knight under King Charles, a landowner who purchased lots from William Penn’s sons Thomas and Richard, a town founder (Middleburg PA), a Pennsylvania governor, the first civilian Civil War casualty at Harpers Ferry WV, Daniel Webster, lots of farmers and merchants and veterans of every single war going back to the Revolution.
I have had a blast these past few years, and Ancestry has been invaluable to me, as have Rootsweb, the US Genweb archives, and the LDS site familysearch.org. I agree with a previous poster - verify, verify, verify. Those records could be wrong, so make sure they’re the right ones for your tree. Transcription errors are common, I think not so much because the census takers wrote them down wrong but because their handwriting was illegible and the transcriber did the best he or she could.
Another tip for prospective researchers - throw an ancestor’s name into a Google Books search - it’s amazing what will come up. I have found entire narratives written about my families, providing incredible details into their lives.
My pleasure. The web has completely revolutionized the whole thing, making it simple, even trivial at times, to track down other working genealogists who have this or that part of a story, and need something that you happen to already know. By and large genealogists are the nicest people on the web, imho.
OTOH, there’s A) a lot of total BS in the LDS records, including basics like spellings of names (my surname grandfather’s is dead wrong); and B) there was a lot of fraud among the professional “hired gun” genealogists working in the 19th century, when it had its first golden age.