I can't resist a good bargain. OK, so sometimes my love for “good deals” means walking out of a department store with two bulging shopping bags and a $150 burden on my credit card. But, as I'll repeatedly point out to my wife until she lets me keep all my “bargain” purchases, it might have cost $500 to fill those bags at full retail price.

Never before have genealogy shoppers been presented with so many choices to fill their shopping bags. The proliferation of electronic data and ease of desktop publishing, the boom in Web sites and genealogy gizmos all mean that the family historian with money to burn can have a very full stocking this holiday season. One recent market study found that almost 12 million US adults will spend more than $100 on their genealogy hobby this year.