What is a reliable and reasonably priced site similar to ancestry.com?

There isn't one. Stop and think; if the hamburger fairy gave everyone a free hamburger every day, would McDonald's stay in business? If there were a free site as large and reliable as Ancestry.com, would Ancestry stay in business?

Or, since you asked "reasonably priced", if a chain sold hamburgers just as good as McDonald's for half the price, would McDonald's stay in business?

You can find things for free on the Mormon's site, US Gen Web, the query boards at Ancestry and GenForum, and Rootsweb.

http://www.tedpack.org/yagenlinks.html

has links and tips for all of those sites.

You can go to a Family History Center. They will help you get started. Someone there may have an Ancestry subscription they will let you use.

You don't "look up" your genealogy; you build it, one generation at a time. It takes an hour or two per person, if you verify properly. I usually figure 100 - 300 hours to get back to 1850, on 75% of their lines, for white people in the USA. (A little longer, and only until 1870, for black ones.)

There isn't one that has the amount of original source records. If you find it too pricey, your public library might have a subscription to it that you can use for free.

It is a website with records that you need to help you with your genealogy, not one that just has family trees. Ancestry.Com has ads running. When you see a someone finding their grandfather's WW1 draft registration record that is a great original source record. When someone finds their family in a census that again is a good record. However, when you see a man pointing to a family tree and stating he found his family in a family tree going back before the civil war, THAT IS NOT A RECORD and it might have many errors.

You must distinguish between the records they have obtained and put online and their subscriber submitted family trees. Information in family trees on ANY website must be viewed with caution. They are not submitted by some expert working for the websites but by folks like you and me. You frequently will see different information on the same people from different subscribers. Then you will see the same information on the same people from many different subscribers but that doesn't mean for one moment the information is correct. Too many people copy without verifying. The information can be useful as clues only as to where to get the documentation.

A good source is a Family History Center at a Latter Day Saints(Mormon) Church. They have records on people all over the world, not just Mormons. In Salt Lake City, they have the world's largest genealogical collection. Their FHCs can order microfilm for you to view at a nominal fee of about $3.

I have never had them to try and convert me nor have I heard of them doing that to anyone else that has used their resources. Just visit their free website, FamilySearch.org, to get their hours for the general public.

FamilySearch.org now has a pilot program where they are having volunteers to transcribe records they have and put them online. I believe they have just scratched the surface. I believe once they are through they will blow all the other websites out of the water.

No way are all records online but the ones you find will save you time and money. Don't expect to find information on the living on genealogy websites as that can be an invasion of privacy and can lead to identity theft.

http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.h...

Here is a link with links to 50 other websites, some free and some fee. I feel those that only have family trees are worthless.

http://www.progenealogists.com/top50genealogy2008....

If you haven't done so you need to get as much information from living family as possible. Find out if any has any old family bibles. Ask to see and make copies of any birth, marriage and death certificates they might have on deceased family. Depending on the religious faith, baptismal, first communion, confirmation and marriage certificates from their church can be just as helpful.

Interview your senior members and tape them if they will let you. They very likely will get into telling stories of bygone days you wouldn't write down but in those stories you might find later will be clues that will help you break through a brick wall.

In genealogy, we document everything. Too many budding genealogist get frustrated and quit because they copied something from someone else’s tree that was improperly documented and later learned they were researching the wrong ancestor. There is an excellent tutorial for those who are new to family research at http://rwguide.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ ; I recommend it to everyone starting out in genealogy. After you complete the tutorial, the following is a basic plan and generally only requires the tools that you already have like your computer and Internet service provider.

The person you know about is you, so, start with your birth certificate, which has your parents, and then ask your parents for copies of their birth certificates, which will have your grandparents on them. Then if you grandparents are living, continue the process. At some point, you will experience a problem depending on when you grandparents or great grandparents were born, in that; birth certificates did not exist before the early 1900s. Therefore, you need to get back to 1930 with personal records because those types of records are not available to the public for 50 to 100 years depending on the jurisdiction in which they are held.

By copying or ordering these documents, you have gone to relatively little expense and you have three generations plus yourself and you have it documented with primary documents. That will give you 2 parents, 4 grandparents, and 8 great grandparents names to start researching. Now, you can use death certificates, marriage records, census records, immigration records, church records, court records and many other sources to research your ancestry. Your public libraries will most likely have both Ancestry.com and Heritage Quest.com free for anyone to use while at the library and with a library card you should be able to use Heritage Quest at home.

Another free online resource is the LDS/Mormon site, which has many free online records at http://www.familysearch.org/ and original documents on their pilot site at http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.h... . In addition to their online records, they have the Family History Centers where you can go for help with research and look at microfilm and they only charge nominal fees if they have to order something specifically for you . Find a location near you on their website and call to check hours of operation. http://www.familysearch.org/ .

Additionally, USGenWeb is another free online resource at http://www.usgenweb.org/ . This site is packed with how-to tips, queries and records for every state and most counties within those states. Then, there is Rootsweb at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ a free site hosted by Ancestry.com where you can search for surnames, post queries on the message boards and subscribe to surname mailing lists.

Also, do not forget to check Cyndi’s List at http://www.cyndislist.com/ and ProGenealogist top 100 genealogist websites at http://familytreemagazine.com/article/101best2009

both of these sites have many links for both free and fee based sites.

Too much money? About $159 for an entire year which is only about $13 a month. You will pay more than $13 to get a copy of just ONE birth or death certificate of someone. To be able to sit in the comfort of your easy-chair, at 3 AM in your pj's instead of going to courthouses and county offices, on THEIR schedule, paying for gas, getting papers copied, and lodging if you are searching for anything that is not located in your own town, etc. Pay the dang $159. You will never miss it and will get way more than $159 worth out of it. You will pay hundreds more doing it the old fashioned way. They already did that work for you and charge you a fraction of the expense, and you can use it at your leisure.

A reliable and reasonably priced site is Ancestry.com.... it is FREE at many libraries

Robert