The Virtual Brick Wall
I see lots of posts to message boards, mailing lists, and genealogy forums asking for help with "brick walls," only to find out the walls are made of bytes, not bricks.
If, in your search for that elusive ancestor, your butt hasn't left the chair in front of your computer, you don't have a brick wall. It seems to be a more and more frequently held assumption that if they aren't found online, the records aren't out there. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Frankly, even if it were possible to digitize every record, from a man-power standpoint, I don't believe there will ever been enough server space to hold them all!
So get thee down to the County Recorder's office or the genealogy library, which is often the local repository for county records, and get dirty. Do that for awhile and then you might have a true "brick wall."
