The January-February issue Ancestry focuses on the work lives of our forebears. In Nice Work If You Can Get It, I discover that the amateur, unpaid genealogist of today had well-paid predecessors a century ago.
We do it because we love it.
There’s always one more elusive ancestor to track down, one more document to pinpoint. As family historians, we love the people we meet in the course of our work, the places we visit. Strangers do us invaluable favors, and we love paying those back and paying them forward, though few of us are ever paid in cold, hard cash for our work.
Perhaps we’re living in the wrong century. An article in the Pine Island (Minnesota) Record dated 10 March 1910 (reprinted from the Washington Herald) shows just how generously we may have been compensated for our hard work 100 years ago…
