The Beauty of Review

As I previously blogged, I am reviewing some information given to me thirteen years ago by another Percival researcher. I briefly looked at this information when I received it, and then promptly re-entered the job market. For the next ten years, I still worked on my family history, but this particular document sat as I worked on other family lines and even did research for other people. At the end of those ten years, which were spent as a library clerk in Michigan, DH and I set to work to prepare our house for sale, as our retirement goal was to get the hell heck out of Michigan. During those ten years, I accumulated a mass of information, such as census, excerpts from books, photographs, and those family histories shared with me by others. Unfortunately, any paper that was not already filed was relegated to a box.

By the time our house was placed on the market I had several boxes stacked in the closet in my office. Their next location was the garage of the rented condo here in Tennessee. Finally, they made it to our newly constructed house.

It soon became apparent that my 6 x 10 office was in need of more storage. I added a four drawer legal size cabinet to my existing 4 drawer letter size and a two drawer furniture style lateral cabinet. Once we made our move from condo to house, I began sorting through all the census records I had accumulated. One of my goals was to link an image of every census record I owned to the family which it belonged. That was a long and tedious process, and actually began my review of what I had and what was missing for each family.

Then, having set up my filing system, I got to work.  It's been over a year and a half since I started the census project, which is now complete. Having moved on to other research, I was ready to review again, hence the current review project.

The real beauty of this review, now 13 years later, is that so much more is available online  than it was when I first found the internet. While nothing beats researching on site in a courthouse or a cemetery, having access to census, vital records, cemetery records and county histories online is such a true bonus. It makes the subscriptions to Ancestry and Genealogy Bank so worthwhile.