As of today, we're just 140 days away from the release of the 1940 US census on April 2, 2012!  This release is historic for a number of reasons, first and foremost is that it will be the first census released as free digital images at the National Archives website.  The images will be there, but until the census is indexed you'll have to browse the images to find the families you're interested in. 
     FamilySearch is now recruiting volunteers to help with the indexing of over 132 million names.  You can sign up here.  And you can even pick the state you're most interested in!  I picked Michigan.  (You had to ask?)

     By 1990, I had been researching my family history for about 16 years.  I'd made a couple of research trips to Michigan, written countless letters to libraries, archives, distant relatives and courthouses, and spent endless hours at the Seattle Public Library and National Archives on Sand Point Way, cranking the handles of microfilm machines. 

     I had determined that my parents were sixteenth cousins three times removed (or something of the sort), and traced certain lines back to the 1400's, plugging in names and dates from printed books and genealogies on the shelves at the Seattle Public Library.  I was a member of the National Genealogical Society for a year, but the NGS Quarterly was way, way above my head. I was entering all this information into my database, the DOS-based Roots III, and printing out pedigree charts and narrative reports on my dot-matrix printer.
     Then I had to stop everything to cope with a difficult pregnancy.  After my son was born, I now had to find someone to watch both my children (not just one) in order for me to go research.  The problem was, there wasn't really anything else for me to find.  I was tired of brick walls that would never get torn down, and my heart just wasn't in it any more.  I figured I had found all I was ever going to find.  When my computer crashed, I didn't bother to replace Roots III, and though I kept all my records and printouts, they just gathered dust, packed away in boxes under my bed or in the closet.  Genealogy had lost its fascination, and I figured that was more or less permanent.
      In all of my 16 years of research, I had not yet learned that there is ALWAYS something more to find!

     Genealogists get to be good at reading between the lines - and in seeking out historical and cultural information about those people that we are researching.  I've been researching one William M. Kiker, from Anson County, North Carolina, and it was only a few days ago that I found his compiled military service records (CMSR) online at Fold3 (formerly known as Footnote).  There are about 23 cards online, digitized images of the muster rolls that were taken every few months.    Most of them just note "Present", and it's only by reading the regimental history of the 43rd Regiment, North Carolina Infantry, that I discovered that William Kiker fought at Gettysburg in July 1863.  One card, dated July/Aug. 1864,  says simply, "hands of enemy".

     William was captured in May 1864, and according to another card, was transferred to Elmira, New York, on July 8, 1864.
     I started wondering - what was in Elmira?  Why take him there, instead of one of the other prison camps?  So (naturally) I looked it up.  I discovered that Camp Elmira (known as Hellmira by the Confederate soldiers) was opened just two days before William arrived there, and housed over 12,000 prisoners.  Over the following year (which included a particularly harsh winter) one quarter of those soldiers died from disease, malnutrition, or exposure.  On William's North Carolina pension application was noted the fact that his eyesight was failing, and he was in very poor health.  No wonder.
     But William wasn't the only one in his family who was involved in the Civil War.   His brothers Louis J. and Frank D. Kiker also served, in the same unit.  Louis, although wounded, survived the war.  Frank did not.   He died of a fractured leg at White House Landing, Virginia, June 10, 1864, a month before William was taken captive.

     Reading between the lines helps to put faces to these names; to start wondering what life was like for them before, during, and after the war.  Although all of my Civil War ancestors fought for the Union, my children have ancestors from Mississippi who fought for the Confederacy and were also taken prisoner.
     Sometimes, instead of the stories driving us to find the records, it's the other way around.

     Once upon a time, before my children were born, the only way I could research census records was on my lunch hour at the Seattle Public Library's Genealogy Department.  After the kids came, I would find a babysitter (my mother, my mother-in-law, or various other relatives) and drive to the National Archives on Sand Point Way in Seattle, rejoicing in 4 hours of freedom to crank those reels of microfilm, trying to discover where my ancestors had settled in Michigan.  I went there solely for the census records (1900 and 1910 were the latest available), and I had no idea what other treasures lurked inside that cement-gray building.
     Flash forward about 20 years, and I'm in the middle of the National Genealogical Society Home Study Course.  I thought I was a pretty savvy researcher, but this course taught  me (among other things) how much I didn't know.
     Land records, for example.  One Saturday I went to the Archives on Sand Point Way (no longer needing a babysitter) to look at land records.  What I found just emphasized how much information is out there that is NOT online, and perhaps never will be.
     When I looked at the binder of abstracts of land records, looking for an interesting case to explore, I saw the abstract for William and Elizabeth Brannon. 

(Washington Territory Land Claims, abstract for land patent for William & Elizabeth Brannon, O-501, National Archives and Records Administration, Seattle.)

     The abstract stated that Elizabeth's father, Michael Livingston, testified that his daughter and son-in-law were killed by Indians on their land about 25 November 1855.  The full record of this land patent was on microfilm M815, roll 99, pages 616 to 630.
     When I looked at the microfilm, there were several pages, beginning with the original land patent filed by William H. Brannon, dated April 1855.  In it he gave his date and place of birth (1832 in Ohio) and his marriage to Elizabeth Livingston in King County, Washington Territory in December 1853, and that he had one heir, Margaret Jane Brannon.  The next pages were depositions by Elizabeth's father, Michael Livingston, who said that William and Elizabeth were killed by Indians in 1855, and that Elizabeth's mother Margaret Howard Livingston died in Benton County, Oregon in 1856.  There was another deposition by a family friend, M.D. Woodin, who testified that he traveled with the Livingston family when emigrating to the west.  William Brannon's land claim described it as being in parts of Sections 6 and 7 in Township 21 North, Range 5 East, next to land owned by James A. Lake and Harry Jones and close to the White River.
     Wanting to know more, I stashed my purse in one of the lockers, filled out a researcher card, and went into the textual research room to look at plat maps. 
    

(Land plat map for Township 21 North, Range 5 East, Willamette Meridian in Washington Territory.    Record Group 49, Vol. 28, Box 31.   National Archives and Records Administration, Seattle)

     Here you can see William Brannon's land, right next to the White River, in South King County, Washington Territory. 

     Then I went to Google Earth, and with the help of a plotting instrument I found on Earthpoint, found the exact spot in Auburn where William and Elizabeth built their cabin, began farming, and made friends with their neighbors.  Back then, it was a wilderness; now it's very close to downtown Auburn, full of banks and schools and grocery stores.  Sometimes we forget just how hard life used to be.

     And here's the thing - you won't find William and Elizabeth Brannon on Ancestry.  Their marriage and their deaths are not recorded online at the King County Archives, or the Washington Digital Archives.  William's land claim is not recorded on the Bureau of Land Management database.   You won't even find Elizabeth's father, William Livingston.  About the only place you can find their information is here on this microfilmed land record and the original plat books.  So if you're looking for someone who lived in the Midwest in the 1850's and suddenly disappeared from sight, look to the land records.  He might have settled in Washington Territory.