By Cynthia Van Ness, © 2001

Eventually, anyone really interested in finding those elusive ancestors plans a trip to a distant research facility, whether in Salt Lake City or in the ancestral hometown. With the Boy Scout motto in mind, I propose that you have the following skills under your belt before hitting the road.

[ ]	Ability to load a microfilm and/or microfiche machine

[ ]	Ability to distinguish between an index (to a passenger list, for example) and the real record

[ ]	Familiarity with basic census searching procedures--using indexes, the Soundex, and ward, district, and/or ED maps

[ ]	Familiarity with other basic categories of items with genealogical value: city directories, church records, passenger lists,
	immigration & naturalization records, vital records, etc.

[ ]	Ability to exhaust sources that can be searched at home (using the LDS, for example) before going out of town

[ ]	Ability to record a full citation for anything you make copies of or draw facts from (author, title, census district, year, journal
	name, date, etc.)

[ ]	Ability to recognize and use a Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress call number to find a book or other item on a shelf

[ ]	Ability to use a card catalog or computerized equivalent to search basic categories of author, title, and subject, and to interpret
	the results of a search, which leads to...

[ ]	Ability to interpret a bibliographic record found on a card or computer screen (e.g. is this a book? microfilm? what's the title?
	is it an article in a journal?  what volume & page numbers? etc.)

[ ]	Ability to read the introduction or explanation when you encounter unfamiliar abbreviations or codes in a book (especially various
	indexes designed for genealogists)

Is this a tall order for the typical layperson? What did I leave out? Comments welcome.

Originally posted to soc.genealogy.methods on 11 November 1998, reprinted by permission in some genealogical newsletters by permission, and converted to HTML in June 2001.  Updated 8 March 2008.