Ancestry Magazine

When I announced to my employer eight years ago that I was going to leave his company and go to work for Ancestry, he asked me, “How fun is it going to be working on books about dead people?” At the time, I didn’t have a good answer, and I admit that it was my biggest concern about taking the job. But now, looking back at the past eight years, I’ve discovered the answer. And along the way, I’ve learned a few things about family history, publishing, and even my own family. Here are a few of them:

Family History

• Family historians come in all shapes, sizes, religions, races, and temperaments.
• Volunteers are the life-blood of the genealogy community.
• Everyone should talk to older living relatives before it is too late.
• Ask for help and advice. Professional genealogists are willing and eager to share their knowledge.
• Family historians are passionate about more than genealogy. It is not difficult to make a case for genealogy touching most academic disciplines: medicine, law, history, sociology, statistics, economics, theology, etc.
• Searching for census records at Ancestry.com is infinitely preferable to scrolling through microfilm at the library.
• Competition between commercial family history companies is a good thing for the individual researcher.
• Good indexes are essential and sometimes hard to find.
• Ancestors want to be found.
• Family history research is not
  about the destination, it’s about the journey.
• Most family history software packages are very similar. Just decide what kinds of bells and whistles you want and choose accordingly.
• If someone is trying to sell me my family crest, I should run away.
• Ancestry.com will never digitize all the records I want to access as fast as I want to access them.
• Always go back to the source.
• Even Lou Szucs gets a little nervous before her lectures.

Publishing

• When it comes to proofreading, ten eyes are better than two.
• Old documents, though relevant, don’t always make the most interesting (or colorful) images in a magazine.
• The best articles we run in the magazine are the ones that make us all eager to try out new techniques, records, and ideas for ourselves.
• If you change the way an e-mail newsletter looks, half of the readers will love the changes and the other half will hate them.
• To authors, books are additional children.
• Don’t believe everything you read in books, magazines, or on the Internet.
• Every time a new marketing person is hired, you have to start from scratch.
• The only thing constant in a corporation is change.

My Own Family

• Most people don’t care about my family history discovery stories—including my own family.
• Even if I find a GEDCOM file online that traces my family back to the 1500s, I still have my work cut out for me.
• My grandmother and grandfather (who taught first graders how to read and college students how to appreciate Joseph Conrad, respectively) are proud of me because I work with words and I love what I do.
• A family history project can be much more than filling in names and dates on a cha rt.
• I should spend more time at the Family History Library, which is located just a half hour away from my home.

Despite initial concerns, I have found that I love publishing books, magazines, online content, and newsletters about dead people. And somewhere in the middle of it all, I’ve been bitten by the genealogy bug. I am currently on a search for another woman in my extended family who can pass on the same mitochondrial DNA my mother passed on to me and I passed on to my son.

But ultimately, I’ve learned that genealogy is not just about dead people. It is about all of us and the world we live in. And it is about the people who came before us who made decisions, took chances, participated in their communities, lived through history, change, trials, and triumphs and helped shape our lives today.