Once upon a time (well back in the late 1980s/1990s), when computers could easily run to over $4,000 USD and genealogy software was easily $125+ (adjusted for inflation), sometimes it was cheaper and faster to pay somebody to input your genealogy records.
That may seem a little odd (and expensive), but it was a welcome service for many genealogists who were either not computer-savvy (not a given in 1991) or did not even have a computer. The software – in this case an early version of Personal Ancestral File, probably PAF 2.1 for DOS, was not always easy to use, and a lot of genealogists were literally making copies of genealogy data with Xerox machines (leading to filing cabinets full of physical files). And PAF of 1991 was not a modern mouse-centric genealogy application of 2024, in fact I’m not even sure the early DOS versions of PAF supported a mouse, or at least supported it well – at that time, most people using DOS were using keyboard shortcuts, which were much faster than using a mouse in some cases. There was a steep learning curve.
As I said, many people did not have a “modern” computer at home, but if you were a genealogist, you could pay one of these services to put your data on a floppy in either a PAF database or exported to a GEDCOM. It was most likely GEDCOM 4.0 at the time of the ads below – 5.0 was still finalized through 1991 and wouldn’t be widely used until the genealogy applications themselves adapted it. The advantage to paying somebody to do this even if you didn’t have a computer, was that if your data was on a floppy, you could take it into a library that had a computer, or a FamilySearch Center (or Family History Center as they were probably known back then), and run your software and print out reports, trees, etc., as well as easily share it with others.
From a September-October 1991 edition of “The Genealogical Helper” magazine, (Everton Publishers), these were typical of the ads you’d see offering services to type in genealogy data.
/