Ancestry Magazine

A look at anniversaries.

Anniversaries provide us with wonderful excuses to pause and step away from our daily business and stress. I’m so blessed to be able to recall several milestones this year. My husband, Bob, and I celebrated forty-five years of marriage in the spring. I celebrated graduating from college sixteen years ago (yes, I went back to school and got my degree a whole year after our youngest daughter did). It was exactly thirty-five years ago that I began my wonder-filled travels into my family’s past. And fourteen years ago I went to work for a little genealogy publishing company called Ancestry.

It’s mind-boggling to think of the vast improvements that have facilitated family history research since I began. Ten years ago, Ancestry.com put its first searchable database online—a move that helped evolve the way every one of us approaches family history, making genealogy accessible to almost anyone.

The changes that the last ten years have brought are illustrated through a story Ancestry Magazine managing editor Jennifer Utley tells:

Years ago, Lou and I decided to run a feature article about famous people in census records. Seven members of the Ancestry Publishing staff went to the Family History Library to see what we could find. We were hoping to locate at least one person in each of the census years, and each editor had two people to search for.

Seven hours later, in total, we seven staffers had found eight of the people on our list. The other six evaded discovery. (I wonder whose bright idea it was to pick a woman, Betsy Ross, to find in the 1790 census?)

That was the precise moment that I practically and personally understood the power of posting online images of the census schedules and, even more so, creating linked indexes of every name to help you find them.

Just last month, I tried the exercise again. This time, however, I logged on to Ancestry.com and tried, by myself, to find each of the eight people the group of us found six years ago. I found them all by searching with no more than first and last names, the census year we originally investigated, and the state they were living in at the time of each census.
It took me thirty-nine minutes.

Ah, yes! Anniversaries are good. And the progress that each passing year represents is oftentimes even better. We should all pause to reflect on the good old days and how advancements in technology have made our lives and our research so much easier. And anniversary or not, we should think about the people in our lives who have contributed in some way to making us who we are today. If we, as family historians, don’t remember them, who will?