Most genealogy columns are about research, but genealogy is most valuable when genealogists go beyond the traditional family trees and family group sheets and write a family history.

Unfortunately, few folks actually enjoy writing. Most avoid it at all costs.

But writing never has been easier than it is today -- for those who have computers, anyway.

Digital technologies, made possible by computers and folks like Bill Gates, have only one drawback that I can think of for writers, and that's a thing called a keyboard.

Keyboards have been around at least since 1867, the year of my Grandpa C.C. Day's birth. That's the year when the first commercially successful typewriter was invented. Soon Remington and Underwood were selling typewriters, which revolutionized recording of the written word via keyboards.

It's hard for me to relate to folks who don't type because I was introduced to typewriting at a tender age. My widowed great-aunt, Maud Day Zindel, packed a portable typewriter around on the Greyhound bus as she made semi-annual visits to family throughout the Northwest.

As a little tyke, I watched with fascination as she stroked out letters reporting on family activities that my folks bought me a toy typewriter. I took typing at Kennewick High School and might have become pretty good at it if I hadn't been kicked out of class for hijinks.

But I did learn to type well enough to become a clerk and later, a newspaper man with his own portable typewriter. It's long sense been replaced by a series of computers, including a laptop.

Computer keyboards are essentially the same as typewriter keyboards and anyone who spends a little time and effort learning how to use one without looking at the keys can easily write three or four times faster than they can write with pen on paper. And they can go many times faster than that when you include the tedious process of rewriting something to correct mistakes or improve the way the words repose on the paper.

But that still constitutes the muck and the mire of writing. Fortunately, the computer age has flung writing into the stratosphere, especially for those who are on the Internet.

As I write this column, I'm connected to the Internet and have my browser open so I can Google correct spellings and verify facts. Despite 46 years as a professional wordsmith, I still can't spell much better than a third-grader.

But with my browser open I can type the word into the Google search engine, hit "enter" and in a second or less Google will either confirm that I've spelled the word correctly, or suggest the correct spelling of the nearest word it can find that might be what I have in mind.

In writing this column, I also popped open Wikipedia online to verify when the typewriter was invented.

As I write family history, I use the internet incessantly to search for facts.

w In what county is Paradise, Ore.? Wallowa.

w Where is Maskinonge? Quebec, Canada.

w Where is Laidaw? Nowhere. But it was in Deschutes County, Ore., until 1915 when it was renamed Tumalo.

w How is the name of the Susquawhanah River spelled? Susquehanna. It is in New York and Pennsylvania.

w When was the first transcontinental railroad completed? May 10, 1869.

w Great-Great-Grandpa came West in 1853. Was he a homesteader? Nope. At least not until May 20, 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act.

These are but a few simple examples of how computers and the Internet take much of the work and worry out of writing, making it easy for anyone to write right -- and easily, too.