Do you eventually get to a point where you have to do some traveling when you do

Question:I'm kind of interested in getting into it, but I would never be able to travel.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I'm kind of interested in getting into it, but I would never be able to travel.

It depends on what records you need and where they are available. I'm lucky to live near several libraries which concentrate on genealogy, plus near a Family History Center (aka Mormon library.) I've never travelled out of state and I've found my Scottish ancestors back to the 1600s, including digitized copies of their wills.

I would say you probably do not HAVE TO travel. You can order materials via InterLibrary Loan or microfilm. You can contact volunteers or libraries in distant areas, etc. etc. You can order original copies of documents -- AND, every minute more and more things are being digitized or compiled for the web. Where there's a will, there's a way! (pun intended)

I'd say "Go for it!" It's a wonderful hobby and you don't have to travel if you can't or don't want to....

Sometimes, depending on how thoroughly you want to research. Older records are sometimes only accessed physically. However, my brother was able to research back five generations just on his computer and through the mail.

2 parents
4 grandparents
8 great grandparents
16 great great grandparents
32 great great great grandparents
64 great great great great grandparents
128 great great great great great grandparents
256 great great great great great great grandparents
512 great great great great great great great grandparents
1024 great great great great great great great great grandparents

It may be hard to figure where to go.

The LDS (Mormon) church is really into genealogy. They welcome the general public to do research in their libraries. They have an extensive database.

THE number one asset of the LDS church records is not their databases (of families) but the fact that over the years, they have microfilmed every original record that they can, including many court files/ books that you won't find elsewhere. These aren't online, but the films can be viewed in family history centers across the US. This is how I got many of my original documents, in the early part of my research. And this includes many overseas records as well, such as church registers, so forth.
Online.. two nationwide (free) resources are out of rootsweb- county based EMAIL lists, and the usgenweb project which has volunteer based sites for each county. I have joined numerous lists, and find volunteers on those sites, who do 'lookups' locally. That isn't a guarantee.. sometimes persons on list are like yourself.. living far away.
www.genforum.com has surname based areas... I always explain that you are not related to everyone with the same name.. but here is where you often run into a cousin, who IS related, and with luck, she still lives on the family farm. Or has already searched the census records.
I did a lot of traveling for research, and it helped.. but this was prior to as much online info as there now is.
It all depends on your specific ancestors, the locality of where they actually were, and learning to "milk" online records to the maximum extent.
http://www.cyndislist.com/beginner.htm
One place that I almost always offer to new researchers.. browse the site, to get a perspective of how many resources are out there. No.. not all free, but few hobbies are truly free either. You can manage expenses and spread them out. I worked 25+ yrs without subscribing to ANYTHING. I just joined ancestry.com, and I do reccommend it for the fact of the records you can access without going anywhere.
My husband has ms/ disabled.. so travel is not an option anymore, but I still find TONS online every day for me or others. The best thing to do, is start, and see how much you CAN locate online. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Sometimes. My family is very spread out - I could very well have ancestors born in Finland, Ireland, Lebanon, and Canada, just to name a few.
My advice would be to start at home and work your way out slowly and gradually as you feel ready.

Yes! I know I have because those once small towns sometimes cease to be over time and all thats left is a grave yard in the middle of nowhere. No courthouse.. no other records. Also, you can learn more maybe find a new sibling or relative or baby who died in infancy and wasnt recorded just by going to the grave sight. (But then hopefully after your trip youll post the information with the mormon church and make it easier for others! lol)

I have researched in every country in Europe and the Americas. The only time I've HAD to travel to get information was in Belgium. They have almost no records of any kind online, except for the pieces that a great man named Georges Picavet has put together on his own. They also have no central archives for records. You have to go to the townhall and church for the individual town of every person you're researching to get records. Otherwise, the rest of Europe is pretty easy to research.

If your ancestors were from the Middle East (Arabs/Jews other than Turkey), India, Pakistan, Northern Africa or most of SE Asia, you won't find many records at all without going there to find them yourself or hiring a researcher to find the records and give you solid translations.

When you get into Mexico, South and Central America and the Caribbean, it will be much, much easier to go there to do the research yourself. But you can do it by mail. It just takes a very long time.

If you get to the point where you think you NEED to travel to find records, there's a wonderful international genealogy network out there that you can tap into. Volunteers from around the globe meet on the GenWeb sites to exchange information and do local lookups for people far, far away. I've found people on mountain tops in the most rugged parts of the French Alps who went into little tiny Catholic chapels for me and pulled out records from 1455. They scanned the originals and emailed them to me in under 12 hours...completely free. In exchange, I pulled records from Canada to help them track down long-lost relatives who emigrated 150 years ago. It's nice when we can help each other that way.

BTW, your own local USGenWeb site is a wonderful place to start your research and get help from people who are literally your own neighbors. They can help you find the best local sources of information and understand how people can to live in your area. Check them out as you consider getting started: http://www.usgenweb.org

When collecting first-hand records, such as entries from family bibles, letters, and copies of documents, it is often very helpful to visit distant family members. Like most amateur genealogists, to save both time and money, I usually stay at home and let e-mail and the post office handle all my inquiries.

A few splurges in a life time of family history hunting, however, are in order: When I was first starting tracing my family's genealogy, for example, my dad took me to visit his second cousin, a retired school superintendent a few counties away, as well as to visit the places where both his dad and his paternal grandmother were born about 150 miles from my home town. I have also experienced the excitement of visiting the house in Castlemore, Canada (near the Toronto Airport), where a maternal great grand pa was born as well as meeting my grandmother's then single surviving paternal cousin. With a few experiences, such as these, you too will become a passionate family historian.

Given my empty pocket book, I best content myself (for now) with short day trips, however. For example, during spring break, I'm planning to visit the cemetery in East Texas where my father's mother's parents and grandparents are buried as well as the place where my mother's dad was born. Brace yourself, Kaufman and Hopkins Counties!