EVERTON'S FAMILY HISTORY NEWSLINE is a daily news service of the largest genealogical magazine in the world: Everton's Genealogical Helper. If you want your ad to reach beyond the Internet, place an ad in Everton's Genealogical Helper - read by over 200,000 genealogists! Call 1-800-443-6325 for more information. 18 September 1998 Frank Beacon: Getting Involved The 1 September 1998 edition of Family History Newsline included an article titled "The 2000 Census: A Cautionary Tale". In brief, the article noted that the U.S. Census Bureau has proposed to base official census results on a partial enumeration and a statistical sampling, rather than relying wholly on an every-person record as they have in the past. The article recommended that genealogists write their political representatives and point out that census records are valuable to genealogists because of the biographical and genealogical data they contain, and urged FHN readers to consider the effect of the policies of record-keeping bodies on their ability to research their family history. As you might imagine, we at FHN were blessed with a number of responses to this article, ranging from "Thank you for the warning, I'm going to tell all of my friends!" to "Stick to genealogy and keep your nose out of politics!". Of course, there is no way to separate genealogy from politics because the political process affects our lives, just as it affected the lives of our ancestors. And census records are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Government offices also keep birth, marriage, divorce, death, probate, land, criminal, passport, immigration, license, military service and pension records. And many more. How each of these records is created, stored, and released to the public (that's us) is of great interest to us as researchers. If we want to continue to use these records in our research we need to be involved in the political process on whatever level these records are maintained, whether that is local, state or federal. But that's just the beginning. If we can't separate the political process from the rest of our lives, neither can we separate the religious. Churches also maintain valuable genealogical data, and if we care about that data we need to make an effort to affect that process positively, too. And what about other of life's associations? Clubs, lineage societies, fraternal organizations and professional associations all maintain records that may be valuable to us in our research. Even though they usually don't create them, both public and private libraries maintain records that are invaluable to the researcher. On the other hand, cemeteries are often NOT maintained, but they too contain valuable data. To echo the September 1st article: If you want to ensure that you and your descendants will be able to use these resources in your research, you need to be involved. A letter or fax or email to an archivist or librarian or other official may be nice, but being involved is more than just writing a letter. As we say in the United States, you need to "put your money where your mouth is". You need to do more than just ask someone else to do somethng for you, you need to do something yourself. If census lists are important to you, have you spent time indexing or preserving some of them? If cemetery records are important to you, have you taken the time to transcribe monumental inscriptions? Have you "adopted" an "orphan" burial site? If church records are important to you, have you volunteered to help preserve the records of a local congregation? You can't do it all, but you need to do something. Because in the end the people who make the decisions about their records and the way they maintain them will not look at you as a Republican or Democrat, as Catholic or Protestant, as one of "them" or one of "us". Instead, they will see you as caring and committed or as apathetic and unconcerned. And if they don't care themselves, and don't perceive that anyone else cares, the records they have might just disappear. And that would be a tragedy beyond political or religious lines. Frank Beacon frankb@everton.com Copyright 1998, Everton Publishers All rights reserved -------------------------------------------------------------------- FAMILY HISTORY NEWSLINE is a free daily genealogy news service provided by Everton Publishers P.O. Box 368 Logan, UT 84323 Toll-free: 1-800-443-6325 http://www.everton.com subscribe: <lists@everton.com> message: subscribe history unsubscribe: <lists@everton.com> message: unsubscribe history Recent articles are available online at http://www.everton.com/FHN/