Note taking in genealogical research serves multiple purposes.

• It helps us keep track of what we want to research.
• It helps us keep track of what we have researched.
• It helps us organize our thoughts and conclusions of our research.
• We take notes in libraries, cemeteries, churches, and any place that has some sort of information we are seeking to flesh out our tree.
• We take notes as reminders of things we think of when we are away from our research or computer. For example, if we wake up in the middle of the night with an insight.

All of the notes we take must be clear and to the point and must be legible when we return to them at some point in the future.

I have a terrible habit from years of note-taking in college and grad school of writing so fast that I can’t read it later. That’s why doctors have such bad handwriting. They have muscle memory of writing that way and it is too easy to keep at it. It takes conscious effort to unlearn that. The advent of easy access to computers has kept me from overcoming that issue.

It is now harder to get information because of the “War on Terror” and subsequent laws.

May states now limit how far back and how easily you can get records for family members. If you don’t have birth and death certificates for your parents, grandparents, etc., you now have more hoops to go through to get them if they were born less than 100 years ago. The argument is that the terrorists will use the SSN’s of deceased people to get fake ID’s. However, if the agencies that issue ID’s will run a check of a SSN against the SSDI you either catch fraud or a very rare instance of someone whose SSN shows they are dead.

The SSDI, the Social Security Death Index, is another example. Because agencies that are supposed to look at the SSDI to see which Social Security Numbers are for people who are now deceased and don’t it is now blocked from free access for some websites. This got a lot of attention a few years ago when a criminal used a dead baby’s SSN to make a false tax refund claim. The parents got upset and Ancestry.com who acquired the free Rootsweb.com service several years ago, shut down the SSDI accessible via Rootsweb.

Rootsweb had a great feature with the SSDI where you could add notes. I added notes for every family member I found in the SSDI. Unfortunately, I learned of the death of older cousins of my parents and grandparents from the SSDI. Now, all those notes are lost and no one searching my line will find them.

Something that our tax dollars pay for should not require us to pay money to access.

Common sense when it comes to adding new laws and enforcing existing laws is sorely lacking because some people value total security over freedom.

Laws can’t keep us safe from everything. No law will stop the train near my house from ever jumping the tracks and hitting my house, for example. Preventing easy access to the records we need does not stop crime and only aggravates honest citizens interested in their family history.

Can you tell that I’m just a little aggravated by this? You can still access the records you need, there are just a lot more hoops than there need to be. Common sense tells us that laws are only obeyed by honest people. Criminals, by definition, don’t obey the law.

Too many laws are more of a hindrance to the law abiding and have no effect on criminals.

It was already illegal to obtain records under false pretenses and use them for illegal activity. Since those laws did not work, why do politicians think that adding more laws will make a difference? Simple enforcement of existing laws that don’t hinder the law abiding would be much better.