There are, no doubt, some great aspects to doing genealogy online via the Internet. One aspect is that you needn't necessarily have to travel to places in order to access documents. You still need to pay some money to get the "good" stuff, but that amount is generally far less than a plane ticket and hotel stay. For example: I have been researching my ancestors Finley Sinclair and Martha Lawrence who were born in County Antrim and migrated to New Brunswick, Canada in the 1820s. Having placed him in Dunluce, I did some searching for a Lawrence family in Dunluce or neighboring Coleraine. A google search showed that there were two genealogical charts for Lawrence families of Coleraine in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (popularly known as PRONI). I emailed them to get copies. Two weeks went by and no answer, so I asked a friend with contacts in Belfast whom I should hire to get copies. My hire got the copies in jpg format, put them on a CD and sent them to me for much less than the round trip airfare Boston to Dublin.
The happy ending is that one of the charts was indeed the family of Martha Lawrence and gave her Lawrence ancestry back three generations over 100 more years. Suddenly for the first time, I'm in the 17th century in Ireland. I also have two more surnames to search: Wilson (my third Wilson family) and Hezlett.
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