>Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer?
Yes, things are much faster now. But having to manually scan an entire office of files sequentially was never a thing.
The files were alphabetized, indexed, collated. Clerks knew what they were doing.
In digging through my home state of Indiana's Marriage records, they had an ingenious system that did a fair bit of error correction and sped up retrieval of information by orders of magnitude. This system goes back to the 1800s, consists of an index, and sequentially recorded Marriage Licenses, bound in the same book. Entries were indexed by both the groom and brides last name, which meant in most cases, you could recover from a single error. Worst case, you had to scan that one book for the County, for that year, or fraction thereof. If you knew the date, that made it much faster as well.
Yes, things are much faster now. But having to manually scan an entire office of files sequentially was never a thing.
The files were alphabetized, indexed, collated. Clerks knew what they were doing.
In digging through my home state of Indiana's Marriage records, they had an ingenious system that did a fair bit of error correction and sped up retrieval of information by orders of magnitude. This system goes back to the 1800s, consists of an index, and sequentially recorded Marriage Licenses, bound in the same book. Entries were indexed by both the groom and brides last name, which meant in most cases, you could recover from a single error. Worst case, you had to scan that one book for the County, for that year, or fraction thereof. If you knew the date, that made it much faster as well.