After a late night, spending the morning gathering some genealogical resources. For the first fifteen days of October, Ancestry.com is celebrating their 15th anniversary by making a new database freely available for the duration of that period. Today's is the Social Security Death Index, so I'm searching for an assortment of kinsmen and kinswomen and recording the full entries into the documentary appendix for my Ahnentafel. Very little of it is new data, but at least now I have some extra sources for confirmation. And I've read that the entries can be used to request copies of the Social Security card applications from the SSA? Now that could be useful. I'll have to look up how much it costs to get one; the federal government seldom fulfills requests for free...

Okay, just checked. To get a copy of just one such application, it's $27. Yeesh! I figured it'd be bad, but I was thinking more like $10! I can hardly believe that locating the file in their records is an especially laborious task, nor does it cost much to make a copy of something, and certainly not much to mail it back out. So somebody is being ridiculously overpaid. In other words, more or less what I expected of the federal government. 'Freedom' of Information Act, my arse...