Of course they aren’t.
The eggs are in the refrigerator (unless a really fresh one from the henhouse is being used). The flour’s probably in a cupboard somewhere along with baking soda, vanilla, and other dry ingredients. The bowls, spoons, pans, and the like are probably in their own separate places as well. And there’s the oven and a cooling rack. Depending upon how many people have immediate access to your cookies, storage may not even be a problem.
You wouldn’t limit your cookie preparation to things that were in the refrigerator. In a similar fashion, you shouldn’t limit your genealogical research to the internet. You need things in other places in the kitchen and shouldn’t look in just one place.
There are libraries, courthouses, cemeteries, and other repositories. Even for research done online, limiting yourself to one or two sites would be comparable to looking on only one shelf in that fridge. What you want may require looking on another shelf–after all people sometimes put things where they don’t belong. That also happens in libraries as well.
It’s not all online and it’s not all on one site–no matter what the advertising or your cousin says.
Kat says:
I see people in my state archives searching data bases on the computers, which they could do at home. They neglect to look for deed, marriage, death, probate and other records available at the library that would give much more information than what they find on the computer. As a volunteer, I try to direct their attention to records available in the library, usually with little luck.
mjnrootdig says:
I remind people of that when we are at the library in Salt Lake City. I realize that a person may make a discovery there where some “computer followup” is necessary, but the majority of time (in my opinion) is best spent using things that you can’t get on the computer at home.