Lewis wrote:
> The original question is
> whether we should save paper SOURCE materials such as census records,
birth
> certificates, death certificates and other "PUBLIC" records after they
have
> been digitally entered into LEGACY.
>
> We are paying the government to maintain these files for us. Why
duplicate
> their efforts?
Thanks Lewis for bring this thread back on track.
My reason for wandering off track was that I don't trust
computer technology! I write that as a computer professional
for the last 25+ years, having earned one of the first degrees in
Computer Science granted by the University of Vermont in 1978.
Oh, 'puters are very good at doing things faster, and in many cases
that results in doing things better, but faster does not always equal
better.
It's great to have all these documents available over the internet
and on CD-ROM etc. It makes some researching more convenient
and faster. But that's all. It does NOT make things better or more
accurate. It makes it easier to do bad, sloppy research as well as
good research.
I chuckled a little when I read your line about relying on the
government. I also served in Uncle Sams Canoe Club, aka
the US Navy, for 5 years 11 months and 23 days (according
to my discharge papers [military precision ya know!]) and learned
from that experience that the US Government excels at finding
the most wasteful, inefficient and ineffective ways of doing things.
In addition there have been recent moves by various levels of
government to close records previously available to the people
for "security" reasons. And of course there is the occasional
"burnt out" court house, which one time even burned up an
entire US Census. I don't blame the government for having
a fire or earthquake or flood. That stuff happens.
But for all these reasons I'd never "rely on" the government to
maintain anything.
One example of a "private" institution doing a better job than
the government, at least in genealogy, and then I'll get off my
soapbox. I do a lot of French Canadian (Québec) genealogy.
I have many lines of ancestors going back to the very early 1600s,
and nearly all well into the 1700s. One or two lines go back to
the time of Columbus' voyage to the "New World". My research
is based on the superb birth death, and esp. marriage records kept
over centuries by the Roman Catholic Church, an institution whose
reputation has justifably fallen in recent years. These records span
both the orginal French and the later British governments, neither
of which maintained anywhere near as good or complete records
as the church did until very late in the 19th century.
Genealogists, Genealogy Societys and demographers have now
organized these records to such a degree that some genealogists
say the Québec Genealogy isn't really genealogy because it's too
easy!
So for all this, given a choice between a private group doing something
and the government doing something, I'd choose the private group
95% of the time.
jr
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