Motivations

I've been an amateur genealogist since I was a teenager. I started before the internet existed. This was a world where finding a single fact about a not-too-distant ancestor could involve an entire day of hauling huge indexes off shelves, then waiting five days for the certificate to arrive. It was time-consuming and expensive. As I extended lines it became impossible for me to go further as to do so involved trips across the country to churches and local record offices.

Genealogists were quick to take their research online. The early days of the genealogical web were based around usenet and mailing lists, and the ability to trade information and lookups in local records and graveyards made research easier. In the early 2000s I bought a microfiche reader and fiche copies of the records of some villages I was interested in. I could then provide lookups in those records for other researchers. Volunteers transcribed records, and made them available online. We all built websites to share our trees in GEDCOM format, along with the names and places we were researching. I found distant cousins through name lists kept by family history societies and on more than one occasion received a printed out tree in the mail.

Unless you are lucky enough to be connected to an important family, records are pretty thin on the ground. If you are lucky you'll find a handful of entries in parish registers, a census entry or two, and perhaps a will. Unless your ancestors were notable in some way, you won't find much else. The further back you go, the thinner the records become—and the more you have to rely on the records that happen to have survived.