How was research done in the 1930's?

Information was held locally and you could find a lot in parish registers and so on for births deaths and marriages. You had to order certificates and it was a lengthy and expensive process. A good source was family bibles - mine was a gift in 1871 to my Great Grandmother on the occasion of her wedding and records my father's ancestry from that date.

It would depend on where in the world you were asking about.

Quite a bit I imagine.

A lot of family information in the pre -tech days was written in family bibles, people wrote letters. Much of it though was oral history passed down through the generations.Council (City) Offices also had records as did the Office of Birth, Death and Marriages, Depending on which industry or profession a person worked in, records and registers were kept, Churches, Synagogues etc. Old school records. It can be a long and tedious search. Oh, and photo's tell a lot of family stories going by clothing style, locations and hopefully someone writing details on the backs of them.

 W/o any kinda expertise you'd have been sadly SOL zxfhjkl

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I started researching my own family history in the 70s - long before I had any sort of computer.

I used physical evidence, such as parish registers, parish chests, copies of censuses, etc, which are found at records offices.

I walked around hundreds of cemeteries, graveyards and churches and church yards, and war memorials.  I talked to older family members, made loads of notes or even recorded them talking to me.  I asked them for old family photos, certificates and documents.  I used libraries and read old trade directories.  I read old newspapers linked to the areas where they lived.

And even though a lot of stuff is no available online, I still use all those resources, which are invaluable!

Someone researching FH in 1890, 1930, 1960, 1980, would look at the records they already had at home and in the homes of their living relations like birth certs, baptism and conformation cards, marriage certs, school, work, union and club memberships, old passports, driving licences, military service cards/books/papers they would speak to living family to find information/clues and then research and prove that information by researching real records, found in National archives and local records offices, parish records in the church, old work and school records, directories ( like phone books) census returns and Wills which were/are in libraries and records offices, join a FH society so they learned what records were available and they walked around grave yards to read the gravestones and take rubbings of the details using waxed paper and crayons ( often more likely than taking a photo)

You would do as you suggested, but you might also check church records as well as the records of fraternal organizations (Elks, Moose, Redman Society etc..) in the 1930 the Mormon church  didn't allow the general public to research the records they had compiled.  There are numerous books available that can explain in detail how to do research before 1970, when genealogy became popular, but some people and families have researched and maintained files on their families for many years.

Easiest way to get started would be to talk to the Mormons.   They might have some info on your family to get you started.   Then you have to do record searches at country court houses for marriage certificates,  birth certificates,  etc.   You could also go to Washington DC and check the census info.    Old church records were also helpful.   But you actually had to go out and look for stuff,  not just sit at home and go thru internet records.  

The best source of information tended to be death certificates and cemetery records, as the one universal binder of all people is that we eventually die.  A death certificate could easily hold more information about a person than was ever recorded about them while they still lived.