In my case, my paternal grandmother and her grandfather were both interested in genealogy. I have copies of letters (my parents have the originals) from the 1880s and 1890s where they were seeking family history information. My Mom started researching her family in the 1950s.
Now, without even leaving home, I am finding "new" information and extending the family history farther back than ever. Some of grandmother's "dead" ends now go back another hundred years; Mom's have been taken back in some cases more than two hundred years farther.
It does go quicker these days for a lot of the resources. Mom took years to visit all the cemeteries where her ancestors were buried in just one county - of course she had to do it for a few weeks each summer with little kids in tow. Now, if you are lucky, some one has taken the needed pictures and posted them on Find A Grave. Or if they haven't, you can post a request for pictures and some kind person will take them just for you.
I remember Mom poring through the census indexes and trying to figure out from the bare information they gave which families were hers. Now, the scans of the original pages are online and far more detail can be found by reading all the details and looking at neighboring families.
Grandmother never bothered with the census - she knew (or thought she did) where her ancestors had lived. But I did find details that she did not have right - her father actually moved back to New York state for a while rather than take a quick trip to marry his childhood sweetheart before carrying her to the wilds of Upper Peninsula Michigan. He was in New York for at least two years before his marriage!
Mom spent a lot of time in the dusty back rooms of courthouses looking at deed books and probate records and then waiting for the copies she ordered of deeds and wills. Now for many counties those records are online and I can download scans in a few seconds.
I've also found information about ancestors that was simply not available before. Through Fold3, I've found applications for restoration of rights of some of my Southern ancestors, and for one that he had enlisted in the Confederate Army after his youngest son died. We never knew that before!
And I've only been seriously researching for two years. I had helped Mom back in the day, then digitized the records decades ago, but never had time to spend really trying to get new information. Now with membership in Ancestry, Fold3, and other online sources I can access more records than Mom and Grandmother ever dreamed of seeing. While membership is not cheap, it's less than the travel costs and paying for copies and postage were when they were doing the work.
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