I would like to know how I can go about getting family information from public access sites without being sent to a site that makes you pay for the privilage of aquiring the information that is suppose to be free ...any help would be appreciated.

The National Archives has a catalog available online that includes nearly everything in our collection available at the series, file unit or item level. Recently we added a lot of naturalization documents at the item level.

We have also partnered with several groups that include public access to scans of our records.

Two public access partner groups that I use most frequently for family information are:

Family Search is actively scanning material from repositories around the world and relies on volunteers (anyone with internet access) to help them index everything.

The German Genealogical Group is another group that we partner with that has created indexes to some of our collections.

Researchers can access many genealogy websites for free by visiting the research rooms at National Archives locations, including Fold3 and Ancestry.  Visit this page on archives.gov for more information.