A recurrent vignette played out in our state’s archives, libraries, cemeteries, and private homes for more than a half-century before we went high-tech. On any given day, in any given location, an individual with a passion for genealogy might settle at a library table or on a cemetery knoll and spread out the requisite equipment: index cards and a box to hold them, pencils, an eraser, and reading glasses. A volunteer genealogical indexer was on the job.
Perhaps this volunteer extracted names from the marriage records a clerk long ago hand-copied into huge red leather books at a local probate office—in a building that has since burned. Perhaps he extracted infant mortality information from pocket-sized booklets kept by a local physician who would eventually destroy them to make room in his file cabinet. Maybe she mined the birth, marriage, and death dates from old family Bibles that later disappeared when the owner’s heirs “cleaned out his junky attic.” Or they might have transcribed tombstones that have since become unreadable in a local graveyard.
Perhaps this volunteer extracted names from the marriage records a clerk long ago hand-copied into huge red leather books at a local probate office—in a building that has since burned. Perhaps he extracted infant mortality information from pocket-sized booklets kept by a local physician who would eventually destroy them to make room in his file cabinet. Maybe she mined the birth, marriage, and death dates from old family Bibles that later disappeared when the owner’s heirs “cleaned out his junky attic.” Or they might have transcribed tombstones that have since become unreadable in a local graveyard.