Ancestry.com puts war records online

After June 6, users can pay $155.40 a year for unlimited access to thousands of U.S. record databases, Sullivan said.

Budget constraints and a long list of unfinished priorities have limited federal efforts to make roughly 9 billion public documents available online, said National Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper.

"In a perfect world, we would do all this ourselves and it would up there for free," she said. "While we continue to work to make our materials accessible as widely as possible, we can't do everything."

Subscribers can set up their own family tree pages on the Ancestry.com site and combine personal information with public records from the site. If they want to restrict access to their pages, privacy controls are available. And information posted about people who were born after 1922, or people born earlier but who are still alive, is automatically blocked from public view.

As for public records that contain what family members might not want the rest of the world to see, there's little recourse involving records on the deceased. Privacy laws don't cover public records of the dead.

Most novice genealogists, however, seem to be more interested in finding out whether they're related to battlefield heroes than they are worried about embarrassing revelations.

Loren Whitney, 30, a software engineer at the company since 2002, has been tracking his family's military history for seven years and discovered a relative going back seven generations from the newest records.

Whitney, an Arkansas native, learned that his mother's third-great-grandfather Thomas Bingham served in the Mormon Battalion to help the U.S. Army in the Mexican War around 1846. That discovery led to Bingham's great-grandfather, Capt. David Perry, who had published chronicles of the French and Indian War in 1819.

"It's exhilarating to find these connections and to see how other people's lives have connected with yours in the way they put you in the situation and circumstances that you are in," Whitney said.

Realistic expectations
Professional historian Curt Witcher recommends that people have fun and maintain realistic expectations when it comes to genealogy.

A small percentage of amateurs "have this hope, this aspiration, this belief, they've arrived at Mecca and in a few minutes we'll bring the golden tablets out," Witcher said. Most of the time they find out relatives weren't historical celebrities.

Professional researchers, like Witcher, though praise Ancestry.com and other sites that have put vast collections of public data online.

"Bureaucracies generate paper and for researchers that is golden," said Witcher, manager of the historical genealogy department at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Ind. He oversees the second-largest genealogical library in the world, and his library helps more than 82,000 people a year authenticate family trees.

As fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan continues, there seems to be a natural draw to tales of military ancestry, a desire to preserve history.

William Endicott, an 81-year-old veteran who served in the 33rd Infantry division of Illinois in World War II, researched his family tree for two decades and found out that his great-grandparents traveled across the Oregon Trail during the 1870s to settle in Eastern Oregon.

Endicott said he tells his veteran buddies all the time: "Our memories are dimming at the ages that we are. Get your history down."

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