I’ve found tons of family info just by inserting name, DOB, and state of birth into my search engine. I use Ancestry as a home base for my tree. I do find lots of info on Ancestry even though I’ve yet to pay for a membership. You can find tidbits in various ways on Ancestry and after a while it all comes together.
I belong to Ancestry also and what you can find there is hard to find other places, so it’s my “guilty pleasure”. I pay every three months so in case I decide to quit, I won’t have so much invested.
For free resources, I have found http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ invaluable. I use the “Family Tree” search quite often and anyone can use it, but always verify info as in all net searches due to conflicting info in the “trees”.
Genealogy is so addictive!...but I’ve been quite pleased to find on both sides of my family that we arrived in this country quite early...mid-1600’s....part of that Scot-Irish/English that populated the south.