My wife asked me the other day "why don't you blog anymore"? She thinks I'm a good writer and knows I enjoyed doing it. I don't have a good answer other than I guess I always find something else to do (and it's not reading the growing book collection I'm building when thrifting, much to her chagrin). I keep renewing my ancestry.com membership because they keep giving me a deal. With my job it's nice to have something "mindless" to do at night and quite frankly those little 'shaky leafs' are pretty mindless. You do have to pay attention to them to make sure they're the correct record, and often there are transcription errors but for the most part, it's click-compare-add-done. So much so that I've currently got 430,612 of those records attached to people in my tree. You read that right - I've matched a little short of a half million records to people in my tree. My order history at Ancestry shows my first subscription 7/21/2012. The Google tells me there have been 4,252 days since then meaning I'm averaging 101 records/day. Doing the math on that shocks me as I've taken a few significant breaks during this time and I don't have time to work on it daily.
In my first post I posted that I had 44,993 people in my tree. Fast forward to today and it's 136,222 (see, I am actually doing something with the shaky leafs)! One thing that's helped is that most of my family stayed in Michigan and the Library of Michigan now has a ton of newspapers available online (do you know how many people you can add to your tree when you're able to look up birth and marriage announcements and obituaries while sitting on your couch?). In the past I had to drive downtown, usually with a list of items to find, then find what microfilm I wanted to search (hoping the record was indexed in their books) and then search for the page. Now? I put a name in and hit search and it brings the pages to me in seconds. In another early post I posted a list of links that I used back then. Looking that list over about half of them are still valid (some have just changed urls, which seems silly to me). I'd add newspapers.com and the aforementioned Library of Michigan site. Seriously, if you live in Michigan and are interested in genealogy (or history in general) sign up for a library card (another thing you can do from your couch) and get to searching - it's FREE!
The one thing I wrote back then that I absolutely disagree with now is use of the www.familysearch.org family tree. Their idea is wonderful - have people collaborate on one world tree. Unfortunately there are so many people that are so careless that the information is almost useless. I have tried to fix errors in "my part" of the tree and I have given up. I regret giving that recommendation, but one regret isn't bad at all.
Why am I posting this tonight? I think it's neat to look back and see how things have changed. I also think I'm going to try to heed her advice and try some blogging again. I'm a tad bored with what I've been doing in my tree and I enjoy telling the stories about the people and how information came together. Who knows if anyone will read it or how long I'll stick with it but I'll give it another try. Wish me luck!
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