My oldest sister is nearing her certification in geneology. She's been researching our family and her husband's for at least 30 years. Now "retired," she and her husband are volunteers at the main LDS Salt Lake research facility, helping others who travel there to do research. Virginia says that the certification is more stringent and more work than getting her master's in special ed! Her mentor has told her that she would be the first deaf person to become certified (I don't know if that's "just" in the U.S., or for that particular accreditation body, etc.).

She has many stories about helping people break through research barriers, finding name variations created by census takers etc. One that I remember dealt with a name that started with Q. She finally found the next link by looking at names that started with S, because the old-fashioned "curly" cursive capital Q could be mistakenly transcribed as an S.

While she does use Ancestry.com and similar sites (in additon to many other types of research), it is with great care and insistence that all claimed links be documented through primary sources. She has traced lines of our family back into the 900s, but again that is 30 years work and rigorous scholarship. I both laugh and cringe at the Ancestry.com TV ads where people "click on the leaf" and miraculously learn about their lineage -- if only it were that easy!