GODFREY-LIBRARY-HELP-L Archives

Archiver > GODFREY-LIBRARY-HELP > 2006-06 > 1150028492


From: "WRidge" <>
Subject: Re: [Godfrey Lib-H] Research options still remain
Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 07:21:32 -0500
References: <2c2.8d038f2.31bc286e@aol.com> <448ABBA0.32763.34D33316@localhost> <008401c68ceb$42038d10$6601a8c0@m1070n> <002101c68cfd$904c6ca0$6402a8c0@pcclub>


Helene,
I love your story! There is so much truth in what you say. I did my
research years ago just as you did and I wouldn't trade all my trips and
letter writing and phone calling for all the computer information out there
today. I traveled 50 miles to read my very first microfilm on which I found
my great grandmother and her six children. I'll never forget that first
'find.' There is nothing I find on the Internet to compare with that
excitement.
Don't get me wrong. I love the Internet and am computer addicted. I
researched a line in California using e-mails, online resources, and the
help of wonderful volunteers in California. I would not have been able to
do what I did without cross-country travel, had it not been for the
Internet. Yet all that did not match the excitement of finding a probate
package hidden away in a dusty corner in a small courthouse in Mississippi!
I still do genealogy - much of it on the Internet! - but readers must
recognize that genealogy without documentation is mythology. One MUST have
the documentation to support the information.
Wanda in Arkansas

----- Original Message -----
From: "Helene" <>
To: <>
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2006 9:20 PM
Subject: Re: [Godfrey Lib-H] Research options still remain


> Oh for the excitement of the good old days. I work in a University
> setting where the students cannot even imagine not having "instantaneous
> gratification". When I started doing research nearly 50 years ago, the
> excitement of the mailman delivering a letter with possible information
> that we could share with everyone was worth enough excitement to keep us
> writing more letters.
> My husband and I have taken our vacations to courthouses, libraries and
> small town libraries that had a world of information that the larger
> libraries did not have. We've had librarians take pictures of tombstones
> they knew of and sent to us months after our trip to their town.We met
> people in courthouses who called local historians to come to meet us or
> put us on the phone to find people we needed to meet. We taped hour of
> stories that were told to us in the south and heard about old ancestors as
> well as being fed by families who begged us to stay over a weekend so we
> can show you some of the family cemeteries. We've jumped into jeeps in
> Alabama where a shirt tail relative told us he had been waiting for us to
> return so he could show us the cemetery that had been restored that had
> been overgrown several years earlier. The feeling of standing in that
> thicket of trees looking at the graveyard of our earliest ancestors
> buried in the late 1700s that 3 men had cleared out in their free time so
> that when we returned we could see it was impossible to describe.
> How can we tell the younger generation of the emotions that overcame us
> at such a gesture? Being the family genealogist for our "Family" clan,
> any and all of them, I have had phone calls within 15 minutes of a death
> and always get the newest grandchild's name. And we still have a missing
> link to the other 2 braches of the family.I have even been called by the
> police in Arizona late one night regarding lost property of a woman who
> had been the ex-wife of a family member. I'd been referrred to them by
> Texas people that said that if they really wanted to know just call us in
> a 3rd state. I had it for them in 3 minutes.
> All the fun the younger generation has missed by their need for
> "Instant gratification". You'll never get the stories of the family
> bootlegger who paid off the sheriff out of a book. You'll always laugh at
> some story you shared for years and the "friends" who were such a part of
> it become your e-mail buddies. Some of you end up realizing you are
> actually a cousin.
> I wouldn't trade those good old researching days in the courthouse for
> any of the data bases there are. we went in early in the morning in clean
> clothes and left dirty but estatic with our finds at the end of the day.
> Helene

---
[This E-mail scanned for viruses at HNB.com]

This thread: