New People, a Mix Up and a Complaint

Early on in my genealogy search, I discovered that one of my grandfather's aunts, Antje, married Hendrick Noot.  According to my research, they had five children, two of whom died almost immediately and one lived less than two years.  That left two children, one I found almost no information about and the other who married and supposedly had three children I had no information about.  Yesterday, I rediscovered a website that I guess I had seen at the beginning of my search but forgot about.  This site is called geneanet.org.  At that site, I searched the name "Tuijnman" and found 12 pages of hits!  These "hits" were family trees that people had put together and somewhere in their family tree was the name "Tuijnman".  I clicked on the first one and immediately found references to Antje Tuijnman Noot!  I was so excited!  I carefully read through all the information there and it discussesd a son of Antje and Hendrick named Cornelis "Knicky" Noot.  This was a son I hadn't heard of!  I quickly emailed the author of this family tree, Vicki.  She wrote back to tell me that she'd been researching her family tree for years and had published a book about her findings, "My Dutch Family".  She was kind enough to tell me where to buy or even download her book for free (http://www.lulu.com/).  She also gave me access to her detailed family tree. 

As you can imagine, I couldn't wait to read her book and look closely at her family tree.  Right away, I saw that she had completely different children for Antje and Hendrick than I had!  Panicked, I double checked my dates of birth and death for both of them - did I have a different Antje and Hendrick??  I was afraid none of her information would be relevent to me at all!  Luckily, we had the same birth/death dates and same small town in the Netherlands, so they must be the same Antje and Hendrick. 

Vicki had told me that her mother had actually met Cornelis "Knicky" Noot, and I have less confidence in my research than I have in hers.  I sent her another email with the names and information I had and how they differed from hers.  She hasn't responded yet, but hopefully she will soon.  I also skimmed through her book, finding pictures of Antje (!!) and Cornelis too.  Vicki is related on the "Noot" side and they are related to my family only by Antje's marriage to Hendrick, so only the children born to Antje are my relatives.  I plan to read about these people in Vicki's book more carefully to see if I can determine to whom I am actually related!

So I've written about the new people I discovered (both Cornelis and Vicki herself!) and the mix up with Antje and Hendrick's children.  Now for my complaint...

Much earlier in this blog, I explained how useless I found ancestry.com to be.  I had signed on with them for the free trial period and then discontinued before I had to pay them as I hardly found any useful material.  Yesterday I was searching for some information related to Cornelis "Knicky" Noot.  It turns out he also came to the US and lived in Iowa and died in Minnesota.  In trying to verify his info and find any possible spouses or children, I was searching through census records and death records.  These kinds of records are state and/or federal records that should be freely searchable.  Well, they are searchable, but only thru ancestry.com!!  Why has our government turned over all of these public records to a privately owned website??  I can accept that maybe ancestry.com is a one-stop-shopping site for geneological information, but US citizens should be able to search for public records without paying a private entity!  And that's my gripe for today!