I am old enough and having been doing genealogical research long enough to be a bridge between traditional, paper-based genealogical research and the online world of today. In my early years of researching my family, I spent days in the Salt Lake City, Family History Library, photocopying handwritten family group records and then transcribing them into my early computers. Slowly, over the years, I learned more about doing genealogical research and I began to research and correct the entries from over 100 years of my relatives research. It took me about 15 years to review the basic core of the family history I inherited and photocopy thousands of pedigree charts and family group records. I still have a huge pile of boxes of all the original records I found, examined, and then digitized.
About 17 years ago, I began volunteering at first, the Mesa, Arizona FamilySearch Library and now at the Brigham Young University Family History Library.
So, what are the basic differences between my earlier experiences and those of today. Most dramatically, the information that took me over 15 years to accumulate and digest is now available with a few clicks online on FamilySearch.org in the Family Tree. If you want to know what I have done and what was done by all of my predecessors, you can view all of the work for free in matter of hours or perhaps days rather than years. I am now working on connecting relatives that, even after fifteen years of work, I didn't know existed.
The most obvious difference between then and now is the overwhelming amount of information we have online compared to what I could reasonably access in those earlier days. But the real differences are not so easily observed. The genealogy research process always seems to begin by determining what you (and everyone else) already know about your family. This is commonly called a "survey." My fifteen plus years of visits to the Family History Library basically got me to the beginning of my real research, that is, looking for information from historical records. We are all still in the mode of finding out what others have done. Unfortunately, the piles of individual family group records and pedigrees has been replaced by millions of online family trees. The issue is duplication of of our collective efforts. When I was working with paper records, I found a significant number of duplicate paper forms.
If I were starting today to research my family, I would spend some time looking at some of the large online genealogy database websites. Rather than spending my time and money driving from my home in Mesa, Arizona to Salt Lake City, Utah, I could spend a few dollars on subscriptions that would quickly give me a huge number of ancestors to work with. Granted, the processes of evaluation and checking for sources remains the same but the time and money involved are significantly less. This is especially true if you begin your search by using the FamilySearch.org Family Tree.
How is the process different than it used to be? Except for some brief research notes, everything I research is essentially online and everything I produce as a result of the research is online. Do I still have to use paper? Yes, when the records and documents I need are on paper. But the times when I have to visit a library, archive, or other repository are almost disappearing. Now before you start to tell me how you found your ancestor in an old courthouse in Mississippi or in a parish in England, I agree there are still a lot of records locked up in local, hard to access, repositories. An occasional visit to a remote repository is sometimes mandatory to find some specific information, but I am finding that those times are becoming less frequent.
I am still surrounded by people with huge, heavy, three-ring binders of pages in plastic protectors but I find fewer and fewer of them have any information on those protected pages that is not readily available online.
If your view of genealogical research is limited to searching on FamilySearch.org or Ancestry.com, you probably do not realize what I am writing about. One example is the Internet Archive or Archive.org. This one website has well over 32 million digitized books and publications, completely searchable, and completely free. When was the last time you looked for some information is this huge database? This is only one of tens of thousands of such repositories. When you get in your car or climb onto an airplane to fly to some remote repository, how do you know what you are looking for is not already somewhere online?
So, the main change from my perspective is that I would not have spent 15+ years doing a survey. I could have spent that same time learning more about doing genealogical research and actually adding some information to the massive amount of work that had been done on my own family.
By the way, if you have a subscription to MyHeritage.com and look at your Smart Matches, you may be surprised at how many other people are working on your own family lines.
Today, I can do more research in a day than I could do in a month just a few short years ago. Think about it.
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