There really are nice people in the world
I've been on a genealogy kick for the past couple of months. I do most of my research on Ancestry.com. However, at some point you can only get the index information for a particular record and then you have to write to the appropriate government (or religious or whatever) body to get the actual record. This can cost anywhere between $3 - $35 (or £8 for those records I order from the UK). And can take up to three months to receive. This past weekend, I found 5 index entries for naturalization records. Each record would cost $10 if I wrote to the appropriate court for the record. A month or so ago, for a different branch of my family, a member of the local genealogical society in that area did some free lookups for me. So I poked around the Internet to see if I could find someone in NYC (where these naturalization records are) who could help me.
And I found Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness. It is a list of volunteers around the world, and what sort of genealogical research they are willing to do for free. Many of them just do cemetery photography, but a good number also do lookups of public records. I found one in NYC and wrote to him to see if these records were something he could lookup. I didn't realize at the time I was only supposed to request one or two records from the volunteers, and I asked for five. He wrote back within the hour saying I was in luck, and he was already going into the city to the National Archives to do another lookup the very next day. And if I could send him the info, he'd do my lookups. I replied, telling him whichever of the five he could do would be great. I got an email back late last night, telling me he got photocopies of three of them (the oldest two didn't have any more information than I already had). I have to send him a check for the photocopies, and a very nice thank you note, and then I'll have my records. Less than one week after finding the indices, and for less than $10. Wow!
So, yes, there really are still nice people left in the world.