1) What Genealogy Resource are you thankful for? Is it an organization, software, websites, repositories, persons, or something else?
Here's mine:
I could list many resources that I am grateful for. Ancestry, FamilySearch, Fold3 and other on-line resources as well as our home library, the local public libraries and other repositories come to mind. My older brother is a valuable resource as he can recall things that I never knew about surrounding my family. Just recently a discussion came up where he recalled some details about the family farm that I grew up on. Perhaps trivial, but I now can fill in more details about my grandparents lives including approximately when they installed indoor plumbing and where the outhouse had been located!
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| My brothers, our dog and me |
However, the most valuable resource that I couldn’t do any of this without is my computer. The laptop that travels all over with me is a workhorse of a tool. It enables me to write fairly quickly and without my hands cramping as they quickly do when writing by hand. That database resides on its hard drive and all those on-line sources are accessed through it. Some of them often enough that I am continuously signed in to them it seems.
Included with the computer is the removable hard drive that is it’s constant companion. This is the organization of my research, the “brain” of most of my work. The database might have a reference to where I got the information, but what about that census or vital record? Was there more in that digital book that I referenced? Over to the drive to find it. Within one folder, much like an old file cabinet, are many more folders. Major family names are listed down through.
Which family was this? Open the folder and the oldest ancestor, or the oldest I’m working with is listed on a title. Drilling down, I can quickly jump from generation to generation within the family. Each sibling is numbered in the birth order and their children are likewise located within their folder. I quickly reach the correct person and there it is, the individual record I wanted to look at! A book about the general family would have been in either the top folder or the first generation that it is about.
Yes, between the “brain” and the computer itself, these are the resources I am most grateful for. Years ago, when I started working on genealogy, I didn’t have a computer to use. A few years later, I got my first one, a Tandy ColorComputer, which was really more of a game machine than anything. It was the early days of home computers. Still I managed to fashion a chart of some of my early research with it. No more than a listing such as a simple cascading chart, it would be printed out on a small printer with paper little wider than a cash register receipt. The paper even came on a roll like the receipt paper.
From that early start, the power of the computers has greatly improved over the years, as has the sophistication of my tools and output. Now I am able to keep databases full of information, folders organized by families and produce professional quality reports with the research. With the connection to the Internet I can connect to resources and repositories that we never dreamed of reaching without much work and expense. I am definitely most grateful for the morale of my modern computer.
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