The Old Ways are Changing

A recent sad event for me was at the funeral of my sister.?You can imagine, with so many dear relatives in the room, it seemed "so right" for me to speak in the past. I went full-blown on the experience of the burning of Atlanta and how it affected our families for generations into the future. I showed some pictures declaring "this is your great-grandmother!" "This is your 2nd great-grandmother!"?"This is your 3rd great-grandmother!"??

The result was excellent.?All of my nieces embraced the experience with a desire to know more. There was great joy in realizing how the experiences of our ancestors throughout history linked to our own families!

Surely, the long years that we spend searching for our ancestors should come to a good place.?Only the genealogist realizes how lost records affect our work.?Hence, the desire to preserve the effort is strong in our bones.?

Please, let me encourage you to preserve your work.?You can take it to a State Archives and have it microfilmed.?I found a good deal of work preserved in this manner at the Georgia State Archives and scanned it for use in the Genealogy Vault on GeorgiaPioneers .com.?Also, it is worthy to note that local libraries sometimes preserve special information in folder collections. (In my own area, I continue to witness a good many genealogy and history books being chunked into library sales).??

Over the pandemic years, we have known a disruption of access to public records.?More the reason, I say, to realize that we could actually lose all access to the public records.

If you have not joined Georgia Pioneers, I humbly invite you to do so now. All of my personal collections, notes, and books are posted, plus old bible records, obituaries, cemetery collections, images of old surviving wills and estates for Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, plus various items of interest discovered in churches and antique shops.

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