The last two immigration request responses showed up today, both of them empty. I had figured that the chances were good out of the four that I sent into the immigration office one or two would give some sort of result. Now after six months, my only result is being $80.00 out of pocket. I won’t try this again. I guess the disappointment is so great because it is the first time, after spending time and money that I came up with a complete zero.
I do have favorites that I pay for and would recommend for getting information. The National Archives information on Civil War pensions has paid off in spades on numerous occasions for me. Their system is easy to navigate, you can see how the process is going on line and the results are back in less than sixty days.
Newspaperarchive.com is another favorite. Most of my ancestors were in the north east region of the United States and the newspapers there were plentiful. My kin loved to have their names put in the paper for all kinds of reasons. I haven’t had as much luck looking for newspaper articles on people that lived in the south. Although there are some papers included, it could be that all of the papers available haven’t been digitized yet.
Footnote.com is another favorite. It has some of the same records that ancestry.com has and in some cases the records are slightly different. Case in point, you can find a civil war index record on ancestry and the one that footnote has digitized includes more information, like date of death.
Ancestry.com has one of the best search engines for sorting through information for you. It is also a great place to find other people researching the same lines. I belong to several other family tree sites and they don’t match your tree to the ones that other people have on line the same way. It is a lot more manual searching, definitely more tedious.