Angie Heredia Jensen wrote:
<...snip...>
I know this is probably way off of our specific subject but I
can't be the only one that sometimes feels very lonely in her
great quest. How do you handle the lousy downer times? Do I
just have to have more patience?
Dear Angie,
Know where you're coming from in that no one else in the family is all
that interested in the quest -- for me, it's a lot like the fact that no
one else is all that interested in computers (another of my
obsessions). I think one of the great things about the internet is that
we can find others who share our obsessions ... but in the end genealogy
is a pretty solitary pursuit. Hang in there, though ... you've already
found how exciting it can be when you discover something that no one
else knew. And when you're depressed about how slow it is, just think
about what it was like when there were no computers, no xerox machines,
no family history centers, no microfilm even (I wasn't around for most
of that but I see the evidence of how it was in my mother's research,
and her great-aunt before her). Back then even sharing your own
research was so difficult ... you had to either laboriously make copies
by hand yourself, or trust your correspondent to return your only copy
of what you'd found. By comparison, we've got it *extremely* good. I
think it's also exciting to see how quickly enormous quantities of
primary materials are coming online, thanks to thousands of people
taking time to transcribe the records. (Feel any better now? <g>)
-- Julia --