Well, I hope the OP will be back to harvest these responses ... there's a lot of people here willing to put themselves out to help.
My own first experience of genealogical research was as a young trainee solicitor in late 1990 or early 1991, when I was sent to Seamen's Hall in Somerset House to go through the quarterly volumes of death registrations looking for the death, some time between 1970 and 1980 (probably ...) of Ivy Knott, and then when I had a date of birth to see if there was a grant of probate and will, and if so to obtain a copy ...
I think I went there every day for two weeks ... because there were MILLIONS of Ivy Knotts all dropping off their perches in the decade in question. I came to the conclusion that it had been thought of as a frightfully witty pun, in the late Victorian era, to name your daughter Ivy if your surname was Knott (as in a knot of ivy ...) and of course, these were the generation whose menfolk were slaughtered in wholesale numbers on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, leaving all those maiden aunts of the 1930s - 1950s, who started dying off in the 1960s and 1970s.
And the only way to test it all was to bespeak (that was the technical term for it) copies of the grants of probate and to look at the associated wills (you needed to have the probate in order to get the reference for the will, as I recall) and then look at the will to see if it was the "right" Ivy Knott or not. It took a long time; but slowly, one by one, I eliminated them from my enquiries until finally we hit the right one.
Less than a year ago, I started researching my family tree with the assistance of computerized tools for census, BMD and parish records. I have achieved more in a year than could be done in a lifetime before computerization. I have identified all of my parents, grandparents, great grandparents and great x2 grandparents. I have identified 31 out of 32 great x3; 44 out of 64 great x4; 53 out of 128 great x5; 60 out of 256 great x6; 52 out of 512 great x7; 51 out of 1,024 great x8; 38 out of 2,048 great x9; 30 out of 4,096 great x10; 33 out of 8,192 great x11; 31 out of 16,384 great x12; 19 out of 32,768 great x13 and 4 out of 65,653 great x14 grandparents. Some of these identifications are necessarily tentative, and I am now searching out the further evidence that will confirm or deny. And I have a stack of about 300 index cards each identifying further enquiries and look-ups for County Record Offices, relating to records which are not yet available in digital format. Each of these may yield further identifications, or the hard evidence to firm up on a tentative identification; and when I do so, they may give a lead to another rich seam of information which is available online.
The real difficulty I am having now is that the flow of information is in danger of swamping my ability to assimilate, organize, and write it all up. So visits to record offices are put on hold until all of the information from the last one has been written up, and any further digital records to which it points me has been harvested.
I think, however, that the most powerful tool which the digital revolution has given us - and the one which enables us to increase our efficiency many times over when searching for records - is the ability to find in an instant if the answer to a particular enquiry is "no". In the old days, if there was no record there, then it was difficult to know when to throw in the towel and accept that that was probably the case. You could spend whole days looking in the hope that there was something, somewhere, to be found ... when now, the computer will tell you in a matter of seconds that your search returned no hits. And if that is the case, you know to move on to your next enquiry ... and THAT has made a TREMENDOUS difference to the speed with which you can home in on the extant records which are of some use or value to you ...
