Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:
It's Saturday Night again
-
time for some more Genealogy Fun!!
Here is our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings:
1) What was your first foray into genealogy
social media on the computer?
Here's mine:
I do not remember the year I got started doing genealogy research, but because I had been using computers since the early 1980s, once one could connect online, I connected, too.
My early forays were using the bulletin boards at American Online (AOL) with a dial-up modem. I would read queries asked by others and occasionally ask one myself. In those days, people focused on surnames and wanted “everything” you had on something. Most of the time, I had no connection to the other researcher’s families.
The best progress I made was when I discovered the state and county sites on the USGENWEB. This was a wonderful user-input site where people created indexes and published them on the county page. I used the sites much like someone might use the state books of resources called Redbook and Handy Book. I wrote lots of letters in those days, so I would learn the address of the local library, Catholic church, and county recorder’s office from the website. Sometimes one of the indexes would name an ancestor.
I also used the RootsWeb message boards. I listed the surnames I was searching for, asked questions and queries about my tough problems, and sometimes answered others’ questions. It was a very active place in the 90s and early 2000s before Ancestry became big.
Of course, the best progress was made once I got DSL and no longer had to dial-up to get online. It was so fantastic to research without watching the clock. For newer researchers, it might be hard to imagine that when Ancestry first started, they mostly had indexes, much like what was found at USGENWEB and RootsWeb. It was the same with FamilySearch as well.
What a wonderful time we live in now where we have images of documents at our fingertips. But sometimes I miss those early days when I wrote letters and would be excited to see one of my SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) waiting for me when I got home from work. Oh, the joy to discover what treasures I found inside.
I had forgotten about dial up. I remember sitting at my desk, hot on the genealogy trail, and the phone connection would be lost. I don't miss those days at all!
ReplyDeleteWhat I remember of dial-up was dialing in to download my email. Reading and responding off-line, then dialing back up. Somehow I think that saved $$.
Delete