There are many public record databases on the net. The ones I have tried are basically useless. You often have to pay for the service before you find out it's useless. Anyone recommend a good site where they've had some success stories. Thanks

LRESA <LRESA500@aol.com> wrote: >There are many public record databases on the net. The ones I have >tried are basically useless. You often have to pay for the service >before you find out it's useless. Anyone recommend a good site where >they've had some success stories. Thanks It depends on what you are trying to get from it. I use two of them in conjunction to very good effect Ancestry.com's "US public records" often has birth dates (it sometimes has them wrong, but more often then not, they are right). The weakness is that most of the records seem to be from the early 1990s. If you find someone, you can see who else lives at the same address. It also gives the dates when the address was current, and sometimes shows name changes for women who married. Peoplefinders.com is even more useful, and I only use the free portion of the service. It often provides related people, and with a bit of experience, you can usually make an intelligent guess whether they are parents, spouses, or siblings, and you can recognize when the program has conflated unrelated individuals. I would say that I manage to interpret the data correctly more than 95% of the time. It is important to look up all the supposedly related people as a check on your interpretation. If you know the birth date and first name of a woman (but not her married name), it can often find her. I sometimes get a birth date from ancestry's data, and then use Peoplefinders to find out remarriages and related people not living with the person, who I then look up in ancestry, etc., bouncing back and forth, and using the social security index for people who might have died (which often gives the city they lived in when they died) - these public records databases often have people in them who have been dead 20 years or more. I have sometimes been able to reconstruct whole families with multiple marriages by bouncing data-bases against each other, with few errors. This seems to be especially useful in reconstructing on-line trees where most of the information on living people is omitted, if they have a non-living relative that died in the last 20 years, or if the tree provides first name and spouse name. More rarely, I use Zabasearch.com, which has birth month and year, and the date the record was made. The data is more recent than ancestry, and I would be more inclined to use it to try to contact a relative (but I've never done so). I use switchboard.com to look up current addresses and phone numbers for people I want to contact; the public record databases have too many outdated addresses in our highly mobile society. Again, I only use the free services of these sites. lojbab --- Bob LeChevalier - artificial linguist; genealogist lojbab@lojban.org Lojban language www.lojban.org

"LRESA" <LRESA500@aol.com> wrote in message news:3def782b-b261-40d4-a902-6cbe29b964f7@f20g2000yqi.googlegroups.com... > There are many public record databases on the net. The ones I have > tried are basically useless. You often have to pay for the service > before you find out it's useless. Anyone recommend a good site where > they've had some success stories. Thanks It would help if you'd tell us what you'd like to find out. Finding data on living persons? Tracing ancestors? Looking for vital records? If you're just looking for a few specific details, you might ask here and someone with access to a lot of resources might be able to help you.

"LRESA" wrote in message news:3def782b-b261-40d4-a902-6cbe29b964f7@f20g2000yqi.googlegroups.com... >There are many public record databases on the net. The ones I have >tried are basically useless. You often have to pay for the service >before you find out it's useless. Anyone recommend a good site where >they've had some success stories. Thanks Scotlands People is very good. Lesley Robertson

On Sat, 27 Nov 2010 21:11:55 -0800 (PST), LRESA <LRESA500@aol.com> wrote: >There are many public record databases on the net. The ones I have >tried are basically useless. You often have to pay for the service >before you find out it's useless. Anyone recommend a good site where >they've had some success stories. Thanks It depends what you are looking for. Other people may be looking for different things in different places, so their success may not be your success. -- Steve Hayes Web: http://hayesgreene.wordpress.com/ http://hayesgreene.blogspot.com http://groups.yahoo.com/group/afgen/