There’s more to research than the Internet!
[This editorial opinion appeared in Ancestry magazine]
Maybe it’s because I’ve been researching my family’s history since 1972 that I get so frustrated with “newbies” who think of using only the Internet for their research. Maybe it’s because of the hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on retrieving remote courthouse documents that I get frustrated with “newbies” wanting everything for free. In genealogy, as in the rest of life, there is “no free lunch”! True genealogical research is hard, dirty work and often, expensive. But the rewards for finding that elusive document outweigh the sacrifices we make to find our ancestor.
I’m not knocking the Internet! It has allowed me to find distant cousins I’d never found in more traditional ways. It has unlocked untold riches in remote repositories that I never knew existed. It has given me a community of colleagues through mail lists. It has given me home access to the US federal census, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, state historical societies and libraries. But the Internet is only one tool in the genealogists’ tool box. It’s not the whole toolbox!
There is nothing quite like walking through ancestral cemeteries to get a connection to your family. There is nothing quite like unexpectedly coming across the tombstone of the man for whom your father is named, in the cemetery of the country church where both men once worshipped. There is nothing quite like finding your great-grandmother’s name written in Latin in the church burial register of the same church you were baptized in as an infant. The ancestors become so much more real to me when I walk where they walked, sit where they sat.
There is the intrigue of finding the divorce case of your great-great-grandmother who had 3 husbands in less than 6 years. Why couldn’t Matilda keep a man around to help rear the children he fathered?
Internet-only genealogists miss out on the community of researchers who sit in darkened rooms reading microfilm until their eyes glaze over to find their missing ancestor and yell, “There he is!” and the whole room cheers. They also miss out on the friendships you make with the librarians and government office clerks in repositories you visit over and over again. They miss out on climbing up a rickety ladder to retrieve a huge marriage ledger that contains the original signed marriage certificate of their ancestor laying loosely between the sheets because the couple never retrieved it from the courthouse. And then have the clerk give it to you!
It’s not “real” genealogy until you get off your computer and into the repository.
My two cents’ worth,
Mary Douglass, CG
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