Early technology
What next?
By the late 1980s, computers arrived in a few homes. ‘Computers for family history’ became a hot topic but was, at first, seen as a marginal embellishment, embraced by a small subgroup, rather than an essential research tool. Genealogical software was initially provided on floppy discs, then on CDs and latterly as digital downloads. Now we can use technology to learn, share and converse with cousins across the world.
Data providing websites encourage short-cut genealogy. Of course, it is wonderful to be able to access worldwide records from a device that we hold in our hand; unimaginable in the 1990s let alone the 1970s. This era of onestop genealogy, of instant gratification, means that we can home in directly on the record of an ancestor, or with little forethought, someone else’s ancestor, without the need for any comprehension of the dataset we are using, or the context for that entry. Without the labour of winding through the whole of Hackney in the 1851 Census looking for the Smith family, as I did in the early days of my research, we miss our understanding of the neighbourhood.
THE 1970S