I don't know if this was directed at me, but I'll bite. https://twitter.com/ancestorspa/status/1198227653267984389

I am thousands of miles away from where my family lived. I can't do "boots on the ground" research because I can't afford to go back there. It's great when people live near the records we need, but not all of us do.

So when someone rants about access to digital records being bad, there's an unspoken message that if you can't get to the repository, you don't deserve to study your family history.

Yes, we should save copies of things that we find because they won't always be online forever. But it's not just the loss of the access to the newspaper articles I've already found that I'm distressed about. It's the loss of the access to those papers for future research.

Having those newspapers available at GenealogyBank meant that I could find things I wasn't expecting to see. You can't ask for someone's obituary from a library or archive if you don't know their date of death yet. You can't request records until you know they exist.

You can't ask a librarian, "Hey, my great-grandpa owned this bakery, can you read 20 years of the newspaper and send me all the stuff you find about it? kthnx bye". Requesting copies of specific records via PPV, getting items one-by-one is *limited*.

The real answer is, we need *both*. We need subs where we can graze on a bounty of items, some of which we don't even know we need yet, *and* we need to go offline and target specific items which haven't been digitized yet.

Because the online, digitized items often have the clues we need that will point us to the items which are not digitized yet. The interplay between the offline and online things is where the magic really happens.

I am all for digitized access to records, but there are some downsides. The loss of context is a real issue which needs to be addressed. People with pre-computer skills need to make an effort to pass their pbook and paper record skills on to the non-bookish genealogists.

What I find most distressing is how, in an effort to "make things easier" for people to do genealogy, the big box sites encourage people in bad practices. This is what we need to be talking about, rather than just blaming the problem on digital access to records in general.

It's true that the big box sites encourage us to attach records to online trees and to think that the info will always be there. We need to download copies and back them up. However --

Show of hands: how many people have ordered copies of the same document twice because they forgot they had already done so?

So much #genealogy software is made to organize the information we've already made conclusions about. The tools for keeping track of researching and managing the "multiple maybes", or keeping track of items we haven't analysed yet, are limited.

The reality is that we need to keep track of what's online. We need to exhaust what we can find online, at home, before we go off to the archive. Otherwise we can spend hundreds of dollars in travel money to chase down records that we could have viewed at home.

The reality is that the problems attributed to digital access of records can also happen when we access records offline. Let's talk about the problems instead of blaming everything on the computer, and pretending paper research is perfect. /end rant