Internet Offers Browsing Opportunities

Many persons get up in the morning and drink their coffee/tea and peruse their local newspapers before beginning their busy day. I feel with the advent of internet researching; I have been offered another avenue that perhaps will sound somewhat morbid to most persons. I will however concede to the critics, that it is something I could get through the day without doing- I would rather not. I also wonder just how many other researchers realize what a great asset that they have at their finger tips? For the purpose of our researching sections I will remain with those sources that many of you may or may not be familiar with. The Greencastle Banner; Spencer Evening World; Indianapolis Star; Martinsville Reporter I regularly browse through the obituaries looking for familiar family surnames. Quite often I find at least one that is either in my database or somehow connected. Once in an occassion I will find one that leads me down the road to an previously unknown family connection. These are just truly fantastic resources as they provide marriages, children, parents, dates as well as siblings. Periodically I will go back through the obit archives of the papers if they are available on the internet. I do this very carefully as not to miss anyone. I do find that occassionally in my daily browsing that I have over looked one here and there. One would think that after going through the archives once that you wouldn't need to do so again for quite sometime. That is a big mistake to make. Why? you might well ask. Because, between one browsing to the next; you may have collected material in your database that makes a previously unrecognizable obituary, now very relative. Previously you may have looked at it and thought- "Well, this one "should" be connected but I don't have them here." Later, you find that they were a brother or sister that you had not previously had. I find that occassionally if I find one that I KNOW is connected, but they don't fit into my database, I will copy it to a CD with others and save it until it does connect. Last night, I was looking through some archives and found three that I had previously decided just didn't fit anywhere. I will caution you though that some of the newspapers do charge you a fee to view their obituaries. I simply just don't use those resources. Of the above mentioned papers, only the Banner carries the archives on a large scale- the rest charge a fee for accessing them. I am certain there are other papers I could be viewing in addition to these; but I feel that this selection offers me a paper from each county that I am currently concerned with in my research. I know I can change these at anytime.