Card catalog by Reeding Lessons. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) If you ever had to write a research paper in high school or college, step one was always the "literature survey" -- finding out what had been published about your topic. Remember when that meant asking the librarian to show you where in the card catalog to look, to begin that search? Very often we skip that step now, especially when researching our own families, because we have our own personal knowledge as context. But do we really? Why Do a Survey?  For our Black Heritage of Franklin project, I've been working on families in Chester, Randolph County, Illinois, where many of the families seem to have been free people of color. After reading part of a paper about Brushy Fork IL , I got curious and searched for a more general article about Blacks in early Illinois. I began with a Wikipedia article about Chester and Randolph County, including where it is located, which is in...