Over the years, everyone who has begun researching their family history has had their share of successes and disappointments. We rejoiced when great grand dad showed up in the census records along with aunts and uncles that we may or may not have personally known. The census record we found put us in touch with them.
Of course we also found ourselves facing those brick walls that kept us from discovering the next generation of our family. We searched all the records, books and journals we could locate without finding the information we needed. We posted our queries in magazines and on bulletin boards, without receiving a reply. I remember eagerly searching the name index in each issue of Everton's Genealogical Helper when it arrived in my mailbox, hoping that someone would have answers for my Vanderhoof or Stager brickwalls. I spent two days in the Family History Library library in Salt Lake City, reading through every New Jersey Stager or Vanderhoof will looking for one that would mention William C. Stager or Ann Vanderhoof. Unfortunately I returned home without finding them.
In the early days, everything moved at a slow pace. Your next opportunity to search for answers might have to wait until you could find the time to make a trip to a courthouse or archive hours away from home. You eagerly awaited the release of the 1920 or 1930 census so that you could place the microfilm in a reader and search for new records. The wait for the next census to be released was a long ten years.
Somewhere along the line, I discovered that the local LDS church had a Family History Center where I could rent a microfilm or fiche that might contain the information I needed. It might have only taken two weeks for the film to arrive at the FHC closest to home, but it seemed like a long time to me. Those were also the days when you might have to wait your turn to use one of the microfilm readers available at the center.
Times have changed. For someone new to family history research, the picture I painted above may seem unreal. Today, anyone researching their family has grown accustomed to doing their searches on the internet without trips to libraries, court houses, archives or Salt Lake City. That is of course a mistake, but one that many people make today. But, it is certainly true that more and more can be found on the internet. Ancestry, My Heritage, and Find My Past all have a constantly growing library of online records that can be searched. The resources of the Family History Center in Salt Lake City have increasingly become available to researchers comfortably seated at their home computer or at the nearby FHC. You no longer have to rent a film and wait for it to arrive. In fact in 2017, the Family History Library stopped duplicating films for rental and began making more and more available on their www.familysearch.org website. If you don't find what you are waiting for when you first look, try again in a few days, or next week. It may have been added to the online collection.
At the rate material is being added, I suspect that many brick walls may fall.
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