I was intrigued to read Genealogy's Star's two part posting on Taming the Rise of Digitization. Although not following his line of reasoning, it did spark a thought of my own. As someone who's done a fair amount of research and who is waiting for more online resources to open up, how can I methodically touch base from time to time to see what's new?
I guess one could make a list of brick walls or surnames of particular interest and then from time to time, go to specific sites and re-search (that is to search once more), databases already searched. I would venture that Google Books and Family History Pilot would be two good places to go back to in a set time pattern. But what? Every six months? Once a year?
I may try compiling such a list and testing this out over the next few years. I'm sure that someday something will pop up and surprise me. But of course, isn't that the major symptom of the disease? The never-ending hope that someday something will turn up to help us. We never really ever declare a search dead and over. Although I might just start that trend. It's too bad you can't register certain searches to run over and over again like you can in Westlaw, Lexis, and Google in other genealogical databases. I'd love an alert for several searches.
I think some of us "old-timers" need to get a routine going, because at the present I only do off-the-cuff searches when the mood strikes.
Not sure whether it's optimism, hopefulness or delirium, but I search 3 times a year on Google Books, Ancestry.com & FH Pilot. For two rare surnames I also do a general Google search. I average one real find a year - though this year has been well above average with the release of some Slovakian church records through FH Pilot. The best part of the system is that I can ignore the constant update notices.
Posted by: Susan | 09/09/2010 at 11:10 AM