Many people around the world have found genealogy research to be a very rewarding hobby. Researching your family trees provides hours of challenge and immense satisfaction knowing that you have provided a valuable free service for your immediate family as well as generations to follow. The search for your ancestors can be very difficult at times, mainly because the only sources that we have are written in books, manuscripts, passenger lists, census records, birth and death records that are sealed away in libraries, church storerooms and government archives (to name but a few).
Still, because we are in the "information age" we search through much more free public information than any of our family historians from the past ever could have imagined. We can even carry out a free genealogy search for people in our trees through the internet. Our grandparents and great grandparents (and before them too) relied on their own records of birth, marriage, and death to keep the heritage of our family. If someone moved away it could be months or years before any news of them filtered back. Today, with public access to the internet, we can get that information almost as soon as it is recorded in the local record books.
Even though conducting your genealogy research, whether free or not, can be very time consuming we find the challenge of uncovering that death date or place of a great-great-grandfather can also be very satisfying. More importantly, we know that our family heritage (more than just the public facts, trees and stories) can be a source of great pride for all our descendants in the years and centuries to come.
