Today I went to meet my family history friend, Debbe Hagner who is in town visiting the library for a week.  She’s from Florida.  We have common ancestors in Germany who lived in and near Grossgartach.  We found each other online several years ago.

I was SHOCKED when I went up to the International floor where I’ve spent 100s of hours in the past, looking at microfilms and doing research.  There used to be hundreds of microfilm readers there 20 years ago and rows and rows of cabinets holding the films.  There were also 1000s of books, collections and atlases covering all of Europe.  It was a researcher’s dream haven.

I haven’t been to the FHL in years.  I’ve been away, but during that time, things have changed.  Our world of family history resources has been digitized and now we can access what was once here, at home, at our fingertips.  Most of this floor at the FHL is now empty.

I’ve found some images of microfilm readers and what the library used to look like.  This is part of my history too.  In fact, I purchased a used microfilm reader at a BYU surplus sale for $20 when I started doing German research.  It sat proudly in the basement for years and I used it almost daily while I extracted names and dates out of all of the church records from Grossgartach.  A few years ago, after digitizing the films myself on a special scanner at BYU, I finally took the reader to Deseret Industries.  I’ve kept the 4 Grossgartach microfilms–I can’t bear to throw them away. The digitized images now rest in my laptop and I refer to them often when I need to double check a name or a date.

This is exactly like the microfilm reader I once owned:

This is how they sat, row upon row at the SLC FHL and at the BYU FHL:

The films were stored in aisles of cabinets and drawers like this, each with a unique number:

Here is a tutorial showing how we used these microfilm readers.

I had so many feelings flooding through my heart and mind as I looked around the empty  international floor today–so many memories of discoveries that put families together, person by person, while finding those people in the films after searching page by page, year by year.

Indexing those record collections has made the names searchable and easy to find on our home computers.  I’m grateful for that, but also grateful I learned to do family history work the old fashioned way, cranking these microfilm machines until my arm ached and my eyes were dizzy.  It’s been quite a journey.  I loved remembering these parts of my past today as I visited the Family History Library.