Or even ordering documents!
My paternal grandmother spent decades researching her family tree (she joined DAR in 1913!) and traveled to Michigan, New York and Connecticut to look up references and trek through graveyards.
My mother did the same, but in Alabama and South Carolina. As a child every visit to Mom's parents was connected to walking through overgrown cemeteries and spending time in the courthouse in her home town.
Now I can get ten times the amount of information by clicks on the computer. Mom only had access to census indexes - I can download scans of the actual pages.
Recently I spent nearly $50 ordering certificates (death, birth, wedding) on British ancestors from the British General Records Office. It was a waste of money, pretty much. I did learn my great-grandparents' father's names but little else - with no indication WHERE those gr-gr-grandfathers lived, that is probably not enough to do much more research on them. (Mary Morgan, with father David Morgan, in Wales - dime a dozen!)
The good news is that in the nearly ten years I've been researching genealogy online the amount of information available has tremendously increased. I'm hoping that in the next ten years there will be more access to British (especially Welsh, Irish and Scottish) parish records for may ancestors who were born before Britain began keeping secular records. (The UK began record keeping in 1837 but it was not universal and census in 1841. My gr-grandparents married in 1838, so I could get their marriage certificate but not birth records.)
Another part is that with easier access to records, tracing siblings and cousins is practical and can lead to break throughs. I have ancestors both named Hewitt that married. My grandmother could never trace the wife's ancestors. By research siblings of hers, I have tracked her line back to the same Hewitt who was the patriarch of both Hewitt lines.
Other information can also breech brick walls. I was looking at DNA results for one line and found the founder of a different ancestral line that Mom had no been able to trace beyond South Caroline in 1760. I managed to get back to his birth in Maryland and his father's arrival in New Jersey as an indentured servant. And I have hope that the original family line I was trying to get clues from the DNA will eventually be proven to have moved with that break through family.
Genealogy can be expensive, but it can also be engrossing. Plus I learn a lot of history while figuring out why my ancestors left Europe or left where they originally settled in the US.
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