since I did not read every word on every post I may have missed it but I did not notice that anyone informed the group that ancestry .com is available for free at many of your local libraries. they all don't have it as they too must pay a fee but here in the Toledo area all you need to do is get a library card, sign on to their network using their computers, click on ancestry and have at it. I've been doing it for about 5 years now. have not paid a dime for any of it other than in the library levy that I voted to support. it might amount to about $10.00 a year in taxes.
at this time, ancestry has gone into partnership of some sort with familysearch .org, the Mormon church genealogy web site. in recent days and months, familysearch has been "updating" their site. what they have been doing is shutting down access to various parts of their web site and when you click on some things now, a window opens and asks that you go to their partners web site, "there may be fees involved".
I have used the local church family history location in the past. it has been about 4 years since I have been there so I do not know how they function today but at those locations you could access their whole site. back at that time, the church and ancestry were having an argument of sorts. the church, which has been collecting, microfilming, cataloging for decades, all around the world, made all that information available for free. much of the human labor part of it is done by unpaid volunteers. the church was giving ancestry the information for free too. the point of contention between them several years ago was that the church wanted ancestry to make the information, they were given for free, available to the public for free also. that would make it hard for ancestry to make a profit since they are a for profit business.
well, I guess they have come to some agreement and the church is (my belief here, I don't know for sure) getting paid by ancestry now for the information. but part of the deal is that the church closes off access to the really useful things like images of marriage licenses, birth record images, death certificates and a host of other information. fold3, owned by ancestry seems to be getting all the military records so now you get to pay for that too.
all those banners touting "free" genealogy information, at about (my opinion here) 90% of those sites is for a two week period and then you must join your bank account with them to see more. up until the end of this past September 2014,
genealogy .com was a site that much like this one let you look around at almost everything without having to even log in. if you wanted to post something then you needed to sign up and log in and you could post. they did have additional things you could do but there was a fee for them but most of that site you could look at for free. I do not know when, but ancestry took control of it and except for looking at what was already posted, it is no longer an active web site. and what about those who may have paid the big bucks to have lifetime access? I do not think (again, my opinion here I have done no research) that those folks are getting a refund. they might get access to ancestry for a few months for free but when that time is up, will have to join and pay ancestry.
I don't understand how ancestry is getting control of all these former competitors web sites, well I do really, it's with $. but why are various local and state genealogy sites turning control over to ancestry? again, it's the $$$. we, the public, paid via taxes to have the states gather that information and compile it and make it available to us, the public who paid for it. from now on, we will get to continue paying to see that information but it is only available on ancestry or one of the companies owned by them.
go to your local library and get it from ancestry but get it for free, really free. I understand that because of some of the content of this posting, it might be removed. I'm not trying to push the edge of the envelope here, I just don't know where the edge is. my apologies if I have gone past the edge.
The data that I have transferred to Ancestry is the easiest for me to decipher. 
Bringing the