I’ve been thinking lately about OLD vs. NEW. Take telephones for instance. In a very short 100 years (give or take) think how far the telephone has come both in design, availability and capability. Remember how far-fetched Dick Tracy’s watch/telephone seemed in the 1950s? And the Star Trek communicators in the 1970s?
What about OLDER vs. NEWER in genealogy? Here are some comparisons that I gleaned from RootsTech 2013 last February:
OLDER ………………………………………………. NEWER
“real” book digital book
“real” letter email
U.S. mail Microsoft, AOL, Google, etc.
IRC (how many remember?) PayPal
send a check PayPal, credit card
all your paper files Cloud storage
all your paper charts Legacy, RootsMagic, FamilyTree, Ancestry
don’t have what you need when…. Ancestry and Family Search are ubiquitous
travel costs visit via the Internet
cost of buying books ebooks
hard to make “away” friends meet everybody!
books without indexes 🙁 word searchable online
go to public library lists/catalog online
lose your one copy back up x 3 or x 4 or more online
lost family Bible or diary NEHGS or similar
clipped obit in newspaper digital newspaper
miss out on copying something FlipPal or portable scanners
need to learn the geography Google maps
need to learn word definitions Wikipedia
work alone collaboration
never meet “new” family find dozens of cousins online
never able to attend conferences webinars
TIME QUICK
So is NEWER necessarily better? Can genealogy be done the OLDER way? Most surely it can but it takes way longer and is much more “iffier.” I think that in the realm of genealogy researching NEWER is most definitely better! What do you think?
Donna, aka Mother Hen, until next peek.