Researchers spend a lot of time looking for documents. In fact,
they may spend more time on this than on reading what they have
found. It took me more than 20 years to find my great-
grandfather’s birth certificate, but only a few minutes to read
it once I had tracked it down. Not that I spent every waking
minute of those 20 years in hot pursuit, but I did devote many
hours to the problem during that time. It took quite a bit of
creative thinking and the use of some less than obvious record
sources to get there, but I made it in the end, and felt very
pleased with myself as a result. The fact that the answer to one
question presented me with another bigger, and so far
unresolved, problem is neither here nor there. Many kinds of
research lend themselves to the use of standard sources which
provide the essential information in most cases. Genealogists in
particular use various birth, marriage and death records, census
returns and probate records to work their way back through the
generations. This works fairly w