Getting Started (again)

After a fifteen year hiatus, I've returned to researching genealogy! At this point, I'm trying to delve through a couple of banker boxes which I've recently uncovered at my parents' home. I remember some of the research, the research trip to Salt Lake City, and some of the research volumes I acquired.

Looking back, I see of how little value some of them were. Today - after fifteen years - a few are quite comical. Take, for example, Genealogy Via the Internet: Tracing Your Family Roots Quickly and Easily : Computerized Genealogy in Plain English, which is a 192-page explanation on the advances in genealogical research in the (ahem) Internet era. Remarkably, the book is still in print. The following excerpt is comically illustrative:

For a Windows 95 computer, don't even turn it on unless you have a minimum of 16 megabytes [RAM], with  24 or 32 megabytes being more preferable. Memory's cheap now and the simple upgrade of adding more RAM yields dramatic dividends.

Fortunately, for those not advanced enough to have a Windows 95 machine, the author suggests a minimum of 8MB RAM for those running Windows 3.1.

Of course, aside from the incredible technological advances that have occurred in the past fifteen years I'm sure that I'll be able to uncover some research advancements as well. Fingers crossed.