I've been doing a lot of genealogy research lately. Ok, that's an understatement. I've been obsessively researching my family tree and a couple of other people's for the past few weeks. Since I can't seem to get a job in my chosen career, I've decided to work towards becoming a certified genealogist. There is just something so satisfying about tracking down family members and information. Ancestry.com has made all of the US Federal Censuses available up to 1930, and I have been delving deeply into their pages. So deeply, that I have decided I will give a workshop on census searching online at the Public Library sometime in August (date TBA). I love teaching, and I know I can teach people how to do this.
Just as a taste of what I will be talking about: even though the census is online, indexed, and searchable by just about every name, it can still be a frustrating task to find your relatives. I applaud Ancestry.com for doing this, and I find the monthly payment well worth it, but some of their indexers could have used more (or better) training on reading the archaic handwriting. Or at least, on knowing how American given names and surnames are spelled and which ones are common. One reason I have had such trouble finding some people is because an indexer thought the name "Summers" looked like "Simmers." Or they thought that "Hiram," a male head of household, was actually "Hera," a male head of household. I could go on and on with examples, but I think you see my point.
The other day, Ancestry.com launched their military records collection. All very nice, I'm sure, but I couldn't do any searching that day because the site was unresponsive most of the time. Still, it's a nice collection. It was a nice collection before the launch, too. My mother-in-law had told me about an uncle who died in one fo the world wars and was buried in France. It sounded like she didn't really know much about him. But when I actually found his casualty record - Joseph Samadulsky, died 3 March 1945 - and told her about it, she said oh yes, he was one of her favorite uncles as a small girl. Finding concrete information about relatives can change your whole perspective on your family. The DH was excited to hear about this hitherto unknown uncle of his. He has written a Memorial Day piece about his great-uncle Joe. My husband, writing about his family. That's different.