by Delia

Thanksgiving in America is devoted to giving thanks for all that we, personally and as a country, have. Through the years, we have all had many things for which to be thankful, from soldiers returning from war, financial difficulties averted or survived, to medical crises cured or endured. We are thankful for family, friends and home. But as a genealogist of many years (whose mother did family history research even earlier), there are things for which I am thankful, and I hope you will go to our Facebook page and express your thanks for genealogical blessings, too.

Some of mine are:
1. Records. When Mother was doing research in the 1940s and 1950s, not many records had been published. She could only go to court houses and go through records. Thank you to everyone who had gather records for publication.

2. Indexes. Even when I started to do research in the 1970s, many older county histories were not indexed, and most of the 1860 and 1870 federal census had not been indexed. Thank you to everyone who has every worked on an index, either for something small, or for a large indexing project.

3. Computers and the Internet. What a leap forward! Indexes available online! Optical character recognition (OCR)! Scanners to enable records to be examined! States, counties and private groups placing information online to be searched from home! Or from my phone! And speaking of which…

4. Smart phones. Storage of information, ease of searching and free calls to court houses, libraries and long lost relatives!

5. People. Friends and contacts that I’ve made within the genealogical community and all of the wonderful people that come to visit The Genealogy Center, either in person or virtually.

6. USBs. So that I can save images of documents or copies onto a small device that I can carry with me.

7. And, finally, that, after 33 years in the department, photocopies are still just ten cents! Plus the prints are on archival quality paper, so no nasty surprises in a few years!

So, now it’s your turn. Let us know on Facebook what you are thankful for!