• Is there a way that I could go about looking up my ancestry legitimately & for free?
  
• Is there a way that I could find records of my deceased family members' military exploits?
  
• Do you have any interesting family history or ancestry to share?

Genealogy is my main active hobby (Folding @ Home is not terribly active). If you want to stick to free, you need the Mormon Church.
https://familysearch.org/
They also offer free software to organize your files.

edit Someone with a paid subscription to the pay sites could help you find some of the records. The VA has military records for the US and you can usually order copies of the files if you prove relationship.

I always thought to try this, but my family is so small. I think I know the essentials of one side. They came from Lithuania I think in the 1880's and lived in Pennsylvania where the father worked on railroads. I don't know what happened between then and my grandfather, but he served in Korea and Vietnam as a radio operator for the air force.

My other side, from which my name comes from, I know almost nothing about. We came from the Netherlands and I don't even know when.

Do you have to be connected to Mormonism at all? Or is it just some name.

I've always been interested in the history of my ancestors. I'm not sure about searching for free, besides maybe asking an aunt or uncle if they know anything?

I also know that my great great grandfather was one of the youngest generals of the Confederate army. But that's all I really know.

The state library here has some entry papers of a great great grandfather of mine.

Nope. They have the database for their own use, but they allow the public to run through it for free.

I've also found Google to be a good tool. Enter the name between quotaion marks. The results will usually be a list of family trees posted by others. There is a lot of name duplication out there, so you need to be careful about grabbing the first name that looks right.

Look up church records and stuff. My father been checking a lot of church records doing detective work about the family past, about when people get born, married and die and so on. They are supposingly a wealth of information.

Back in may he decided to put up all his information to the the http://www.ancestry.com so I can take a peek too, which I think is very cool. He done a massive amount of work with it too, and currently it have over 3000 people in the database, I can go back several centuries and look

My family name is so small, so I would know if someone entered stuff or not, which they haven't.

I believe there are 7 people in the US with my last name. I also have some relatives in the Netherlands with the last name, but not sure about them. I wouldn't be surprised if there were less than 20 people in the world with my last name.

My ancestors betrayed a Catholic monk and were cursed for it. They also lived near Myles Standish, one of the Pilgrim Fathers, before he went to America on the Mayflower.

They were local landowners back to the 14th century, but they seem to have lost it all by the late 19th, when the lease on their quarry expired.

Other US resources
http://www.findagrave.com/- I'm a member and have posted / corrected / added links for much of my family. Anyone can look, but only members can post. It's a cemetery and burial memorial site, but can work well as a way to track families.
http://usgenweb.org/- Mainly an entry portal to the genweb sites for individual states and counties. Some are great, some really svck.

My sharing- I had 2 ancestors in the Revolutionary War, at least one in the War of 1812, and my great great grandfather was in the Civil War.

I think the best way in terms of actually enjoying it is to go and speak to people: I spent ages transcribing other people's work which was kind of interesting but it was all just names and dates, really. Whereas a couple of my cousins recently went to New Orleans to visit a bunch of relatives to find out more about where our family came from and had a wonderful time. I dare say rather more fun than me poring over a bunch of photocopies of unintelligible handwriting!

For Dutch records, start here- http://www.genlias.nl/en/page0.jsp
There is a big difference between Archives held in the Provinces. If your people came from Zeeland or Friesland, you can find pretty good stuff online.

I used the Family Search thing and found nothing extraordinary. Just the names of my Great Grandparents.

That site seems to be confusing. I used what I thought was the search thing and got nothing. And I know for a fact there is a native Dutch man who lives there currently with our last name.

The Mormon site seems to be not doing anything.

In Norway a lot of the old church records can be found online.
I'm not that much into my family history, but I know my mom has done some digging.
I know of the fairly recent stuff, but way back I have no clue. I think I am related to some french duke and some viking kings and stuff if we go way way back.

But yeah, there are church records online if you are of Norwegian ancestry.

From the page I linked, add a name and click the search button. I just tried it with gibberish and it conducted a search.

Maybe there's something wrong on my end. I'm getting a blank white page with a line of text at the top going on for miles.

I don't really like Genlias, but it comes in handy if you don't know what province someone comes from. I go from there to the province and check their records. I'll look at it and write some basic directions for a search.
Have you tried just the last name?

This probably sounds stupid, and you've most probably either already tried, or are unable to reach them, but can't you ask one of your relatives? Your parents, or grandparents, or granduncles or grandaunts or something?

As for my own, my bloodline is known for traveling all over/marrying people from all over. (Mostly in the middle east though)

Persian/Turkish/Kurdish ancestry here. Have family from almost all over the world though.