No doubt many of us came late to the family history party, acquiring our taste for ancestral exploration only after our grandparents and parents had passed away, possibly leaving us photographs, note cards and books, and family tree diagrams we may have seen and dismissed without interest in previous decades but in which we can now lose ourselves for hours at a time.
In the decade and a half since my mother died and I came into possession of the voluminous notes she and her father compiled during their lifetimes, I have divided my time between marveling at the wealth of meticulous research they conducted and documented, and kicking myself for not having appreciated and acquired the taste for genealogy earlier in life, when I could have shared it with them.
The further I delve into the riches left to me, the more I marvel at what my mother and grandfather accomplished -- and all without the benefit of electronically stored and accessible information and the now-standard resources of the Internet. Feeding the fruit of my mother and grandfather's labor into the modern tools of family history, I'm amazed both by the accuracy of the information they assembled and by the labor intensity it involved. Invariably I think about how much more they, or the three of us combined, could accomplish today with today's tools, and tomorrow's.
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