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I started out with GENUKI for the British isles. It's broken up into the different countries and has a lot of mailing lists for different areas of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. I joined the appropriate list and learned a lot and also "met" helpful people over there who looked things up for me. They also could answer my questions about geography and history and local customs. Two nice people turned out to be related to me and sent me CENTURIES of ancestors!
For the US I used the local USGENWEB sites. Again, these are groups of people, most of them living in your area of interest, who can explain things and help you out. Lots of the sites have also put together pictures of gravestones, lists of cemetaries, and much more info that you can only get locally. (They always need volunteers---something else to do if you have the time. Transcribers and photographers.)
Both of these resources are FREE and consist of people helping people. Besides helping me find names and dates, the people helped to put "flesh on the bones" as they called it. The old customs, the local dialect and expressions, what people ate, traditions--so much more than I could get on expensive Ancestry.com.
Also, I eventually was able to meet some of these people in person and even was taken on tours of "where they used to live." Like a genealogist's dream come true.
I can't even imagine just copying names and dates and that's it. But I was lucky--there was no Ancestry.com when I started out. Using these local mailing lists is the next best thing to going there yourself I think. Through these lists I have also been able to reciprocate by helping someone find their gt grandfather who lived in my state. I also helped a man in New Zealand find his family in Ohio. It's so rewarding when it's personal and you learn so much more.
That said, I hooked up with a few people on GenForum one time -- we were related and we tried to help each other. It was fun but non productive--the blind leading the blind.
My favorite is www.GenForum.com I have found cousins and have some find me using that forum.
Of those cousins, I have given a tour of our AR ancestral "homeland" to three. One from AR, one from OR, and one with her mother and sister from TX. There is one in OK that can't seem to find the time to come over, but I would love to give her the tour.
I always take along a 1936 Pike County road map which shows where the houses were at that time, and a Quad on which I have marked the location of properties our ancestors once owned, from the mid 1800 to as late as 1950. They are always amazed that where you now only see pine plantations there was once many homes and farms, and two named communities (Elk & Shawmut).
I always get as much pleasure from the tour as they do, although I have spent many days on those back roads, some of which are now only 4WD accessible.
My favorite is www.GenForum.com I have found cousins and have some find me using that forum.
This place is great. I found info on my Great-Grandmother that I hadn't found anywhere else. It was like finding the last pieces to a puzzle.
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