Although the Internet and Databases are increasingly valuable to researchers, I don't believe that in my lifetime either will eliminate the need for good "old fashioned" research skills. THE WORST PART OF RELYING on EITHER databases or Internet is that your expectations of how fast you can do research and reality will part ways. That's because there is so much that is not available and some "instant" results may spoil you when what genealogy really takes is PATIENCE!
THERE ARE STILL AREAS OF THE UNITED STATES and THE WORLD that will not give what is considered private information to databases or for microfilming. In those places there are sometimes fees or the information can only be given if you already know the details.
I may have mentioned this before but most of my personal research was done without the use of Internet or databases such as Ancestry. When Ancestry came out I was eager to see how fast the same research would take and learned I was NOT able to duplicate it USING ANCESTRY !
Recently I noticed that corrections were coming up on ANCESTRY. Some of these are provided by subscriber-members.
Every few months I look to see what is new on ANCESTRY and other databases and sometimes I find bits and pieces of information that I did not have, or that would have required archive or library fees or to pay a local researcher. So to me that is worth the exploration.
This is one of the things I did recently when I visited LDS in person; I spent time on each of their database offerings to see what would or would not come up.
To be fair in my review, there were a few pieces of information that I WAS NOT ABLE TO FIND the old fashioned way that did come up on Ancestry. The reason is that while the databases are often of no use where typists have interpreted difficult last names (bad handwriting and no knowledge of surnames in various ethnic languages, especially Slavic names) on the other hand you can SEARCH using first names or other details which may then bring up a family group (and you can see just how horribly spelled the surname was).
This is how I busted a difficult problem for a student of mine who was seeking an African American with an unusual first name and for a student of mine who was seeking his Polish great-grandfather in the state of New York.
