Tomorrow is Another Day
When Rhett Butler walked out on Scarlett at the end of GWTW, she cried, then rationalized that he would ultimately return. "After all, tomorrow is another day!"
This philosophy applies the search for the ancestors. If we do not find the person for whom we search today, perhaps tomorrow will be different. After all, modern technology, such as the digitization of records is delivering convenience to our computers. There is always the hope that someone else found what we missed. There is a lot going on. And what once took months to locate as well as some traveling, data such as tombstones is being published to the Internet.
The Case of "Never Give Up"
People like to remember the Alamo because it was a battle where Americans fought to the very last man, never giving up. Ironically, the "never give up" syndrone is ever present in genealogists who unturn every possible leaf to find clues of their ancestors. Even years later after having researched the last tidbit of information, the memory of particular ancestors is ever present. It is a deep yearning to have answers.
The Key to Finding your Ancestors in the Collections of Today
Things have certainly changed since the days of searching through dusty
libraries and reading unindexed books and microfilm! But with the
launching of the internet and establishing genealogical records thereon,
the task has just begun! What with burned county records all over America and
immigration records yet to be translated and published, there is so much
more to be discovered. While searching my ancestors in the field, I
discovered that county clerks frequently took those big ledger books home with
them to work on. Sometimes, a person produced a ledger to the court house
found stored in the attic. (I request the Mormon church to visit
the person and microfilm it). This explains how ledger books find their way to
antique
s. There are shops. There are other avenues of discovery, viz: church records.
One has to visit the neighborhood where families resided, old churches and
graveyards to ascertain what survived and who has possession of the old baptisms,
marriages and mortuary records.
State Archives also receive church records from donors and place them on
microfilm.?
But you have to search for it in the floor catalog.
During the 1930s the DAR collected old bible records and donated their books
to the Archives. Regional
libraries contain their own special collections.
Meanwhile, internet collections also vary. Essentially,
Ancestry has digitized those records available at the National Archives; which
includes census, revolutionary war and immigration records. You can also visit
the National Archives online and have access to their digitized records available
to the public. No matter whose
collection one researches, there remains more information to be discovered. It
behooves one to join
more than one genealogy website. Especially if those websites continue to
add more information. After all, there remains a great deal to be added
to the internet collections.
The records of Pioneer Families contains mostly images of old wills,
estates, marriages, some 10,000 traced families, cemeteries, and
my own vast collection of obituaries, notes and books in
Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama
and Virginia, all growing collections.
Find the Old Family Homeplace
Atlanta Campaign. During 1864 when General Sherman came scourging through Georgia and burned everything in site, his troops briefly captured this tunnel. It runs through the mountains along the Chattanooga Ridge. Today, as a reminder, an old stone stone storage house sits beside the route of the Western Atlantic railway at Tunnel Hill.
Founded in 1851, Whitfield county was named after one of the first Georgia colonists, George Whitefield, a minister in the Church of England.
