Charlie Hoffpauir wrote:

My system is a Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK board with 2 8GB DDR3 G SKILL
memory strips (16 GB total) and an Intel i5-4690 processor, set up
with two 24" monitors. I do a lot of genealogy work, and often have 8
database programs open at the same time, constantly switching between
them or copying information from one or more to my genealogy program.
Would more memory improve performance, or would having the database
programs running on a SSD be more effective? How could I tell if disk
access or limited memory was slowing down things?

Open Task Manager and look under Performance to see how much memory you
are using.

Yes SSD's are fast. You should use an SSD for your primary drive.