I started working with my family genealogy in 1998, but didn’t make a lot of progress over the years because of limited time. When I was working it seemed like there was very little free time to work on it, and at the time online resources were scarce and more travel was required, to find the documents needed. I always said that when I retired, genealogy would definitely be one of my primary activities.

In December of 2012 I retired, but didn’t think about genealogy for a while (why? Who knows why? It’s just one of those things). It was September of 2013 when I attended a presentation at our county fair about online genealogy and had my interest re-kindled. 

Beginning at that time, I started to spend serious time at this “hobby,” living at our library plus discovering all of the online resources that were becoming available. 

Since then, I’ve been spending an average of multiple hours per day really learning about my family history and recording it, mostly in files and images on the computer. One of the large benefits of the electronic age for genealogy is that I can store thousands of documents, census records, birth and death certificates, headstone photos and the like without taking hundreds of cubic feet of physical space to accomplish it. Between a hand document scanner that I have and my iPhone with scanning software, I have little difficulty turning paper documents into images that are easy to store.

I started working with my family genealogy in 1998, but didn’t make a lot of progress over the years because of limited time. When I was working it seemed like there was very little free time to work on it, and at the time online resources were scarce and more travel was required, to find the documents needed. I always said that when I retired, genealogy would definitely be one of my primary activities.

In December of 2012 I retired, but didn’t think about genealogy for a while (why? Who knows why? It’s just one of those things). It was September of 2013 when I attended a presentation at our county fair about online genealogy and had my interest re-kindled. 

Beginning at that time, I started to spend serious time at this “hobby,” living at our library plus discovering all of the online resources that were becoming available. 

Since then, I’ve been spending an average of multiple hours per day really learning about my family history and recording it, mostly in files and images on the computer. One of the large benefits of the electronic age for genealogy is that I can store thousands of documents, census records, birth and death certificates, headstone photos and the like without taking hundreds of cubic feet of physical space to accomplish it. Between a hand document scanner that I have and my iPhone with scanning software, I have little difficulty turning paper documents into images that are easy to store.