Ripoff Sites
There are a great many sites on Internet devoted to genealogy. Most of them are genuine sites which set out to be helpful. Some charge a reasonable fee for their services, others are free. Unfortunately there are also sites which take the work of others and charge a fee for information freely available elsewhere. An example of this is a site which charges a fee for looking at a database of data from the 1881 UK census. This data was transcribed by the LDS as part of a world 1880 census project and made available on Internet free. Some sites charge a fee for this identical data. This is only justifiable where a site also provides images of the original documents. You'll also find there are many sites which shamelessly plagarise the work of others and attempt to claim copyright of it. This site seems to have been a victim of this copyright theft. A large part of the content of Try doing a Google search for the phrase "
Allways search for a free version of any Internet source before paying for site access.
Unjustified Data
There are many websites showing family trees which may link to your family but which do not provide any details of the sources of their information.
Unless source information is provided you should be cautious of using this data.
Your family tree for £5.00
Some sites on Internet (and stalls in shopping malls) ask for your surname and then provide details of your 'family' for a small fee. In shopping malls these are printed out for you on a fancy sheet of 'aged' paper. You'll get a great deal of information, none of which may have anything to do with your family. An example of this for 'John Chapman' is shown on this webpage. The constructor of this information seems to have collected any web page he can find with this name regardless of whether the families mentioned were related or not. Some of this information I recognise as being taken from one of my websites.
Your £5.00/$5.00 spent on such a site might as well be thrown away.
Where to research
