E is for the easy button. We have come to an ‘easy button’ orientation. All those services where you summon a genie to do your bidding with a phone call or a click: peapod, bed-in-a-box, personal shopper, kindle books, grub hub (and similar), and the ENTIRE internet shopping gig, and now even removal companies “point at it and it’s gone.”
By comparison, genealogy is in the dark ages. To be sure, Ancestry and Family Search have digitized not only the information, but the images of many of the ‘usual suspects’ (ie. first places to look), starting with the Federal census and WW1 & 2 draft registration cards. These databases add more records weekly, if not daily. One can sit in one’s jammies, or deal with insomnia, by surfing for hours on internet, genealogy and other sites, and come up with some interesting stuff for one’s tree, but….
You will end up going off-line, off-computer, and unless your family has lived since their arrival in the US in the same city in which you reside, you will end up taking road trips to see cemeteries, churches (those things that don’t move), and to do research in those libraries (local treasures) and courthouses (or spend lots for photocopies, and perhaps not “get it all.”)
I remember one speaker who said, “If genealogy were easy, there would be no genealogists, and everyone would have their trees back to Adam.” (glad to credit you, but I truly don’t remember where or when.
Genealogy is invigorating, exciting, rewarding, fulfilling, useful, wonderful, but it is rarely easy. More often it is challenging, frustrating, annoying as the pieces that you have about a family don’t mesh into a full picture or a road to take you forward.
There is no EASY button, but there is lots of hope.