Productivity Gains in Genealogy

 My cousin and I were remembering the old days of genealogic research.  I never did any before the internet, but my sister devoted much of a year in 1978 or so to researching, particularly my paternal grandmother's ancestry--the Rippeys.  My cousin started seriously in the late 1980's.  

If you could measure the productivity of research you'd probably count facts--names, relationship, and dates.  In the days of visiting archives and viewing microfilm you might spend days to establish the bare facts for one ancestor.  Now in the days of the internet, of digitized records, and of genealogical databases like Ancestry.com it's possible to trace the ancestry of one person going back to 1850 or before over a weekend, which might include 32 people with lots of details.. 

The increase in productivity is amazing. 

The downside is this: because a genealogy once researched is more likely than not to be valid for recent centuries, there's a diminishing field to explore--at least for white Europeans.  Means new researchers won't know the satisfactions experienced by their elders.