On whose shoulders do we stand?

My greatgrandfather Thorn Smith was an ardent genealogist. He did his research during the first half of the 20th century. (He died in 1958.) In those days, of course, all records were on paper. Microfiche was not even invented until 1961, so basically all research was done using paper records. If you wanted to find out what land a particular ancestor lived on, or who an ancestor's parents were, you either relied on someone else's scholarship, or found source documents, such as family bibles, deeds, wills, that kind of thing. While a fair amount of scholarly work was available for particular lineages, much of GGrandpa Thorn's work was original.

Genealogical research has undergone a sea change in the past decade or so.

First, many of the records that genealogists use to find and confirm ancestors have been digitized. The idea of being able to locate, much less reproduce, some of the documents we now have at our fingertips was unimaginable in those days. (Or maybe GGrandpa Thorn did imagine it - he was a very bright man.)

Second, DNA research, though still very much in its infancy, allows us to confirm (and find) ancestral relationships that no paper research could ever uncover. When you descend from Smiths and Lewises - two of the most common names in the Anglophone world - DNA can make all the difference.

GGrandpa Thorn's research was descended to Uncle Bob and Aunt Dianne, both Mormons. The Mormon Church has religious reasons for determining ancestry, and Mormons have access to the immense genealogical resources of the LDS Church. So even before the advent of our digital age, the Mormons in my family have been able to continue the work so ably begun by GGrandpa Thorn.

Aunt Dianne in particular has done so much to help me learn some of the ropes of this fascinating field, and has helped me find errors in my own research -- errors that, but for the work of my family before me, I likely never would have found. There is a lot of discipline required to develop accurate information, and my Aunt Dianne helped me to understand why things are often not as they first appear, and how old errors are sometimes even graven in brass or stone. So thank you for that, dear Auntie.