I started my genealogical research in the early 1980s when you had to go to Register House in person, queueing outside on the steps in the morning waiting for the doors to open, then all the hassle of looking up big heavy indexes, putting your name down on the clipboard to be taken into the stack by a grim-faced attendant who watched you like a hawk to make sure you didn't tear pages out of precious registers. Sometimes I would risk going upstairs to wind a microfilm onto a reader and look for a lost ancestor while I waited my turn downstairs, hoping I'd get down to the ground floor again before my name was called out. And although you had paid to research until 4.30, by about 4.15 the attendants were already putting covers over the microfilm readers and clearing their throats ominously, meaning 'go home so we can lock up!'
All of which is a long-winded way of saying, it's great to be able to sit at home at your own computer spending Scotlandspeople credits like a drunken sailor on shore leave blowing his wages. Not only is it dead easy and relatively cheap - facilities like "fuzzy matching" and "wild card" enable you to widen the parameters of your search and you can find out so much in such a short time. But of course the golden rule still applies, that you should come to the search having gathered as much information as you can in advance, from headstones, elderly relatives, etc. so that you don't inadvertently end up researching someone else's ancestor Joe Bloggs and not your own!
Harry
