Today I thought I would write about what is clearly the single most exciting topic in all of genealogy. What would that be? What have I written so much about? That’s right, checklists and research logs! What, I ask, could possibly be more exciting than those? Either I’ve gone hopelessly insane or I’m not being […]
Fear and Loathing in Logs Vegas Read More »
One of the biggest problems in genealogical research is deciding how much is enough. We all deal with it. How much dedicated searching before you decided that a record simply doesn’t exist? How long do you spend on a difficult to read document? How many documents relating to the same fact are enough? I know
A Tale of Twenty-Two Documents Read More »
Well, my little blogiversary party is a week late but when was the last time that everything went according to schedule? Last week, I was focused on what was coming this week—two genealogy board meetings, running a help session at a library and “Genealogy After Hours” at my library down the street. The board meetings
Helping Out and Serving up Blogiversary III Read More »
Every genealogist knows, or should know, that keeping track of sources is a must. Each fact should have a source. There is something hidden in that last statement. It assumes we have a clear idea of what a “fact” is. Do we? Slicing and Dicing How small can a fact be? Is someone’s name a
Writing the Fine Print Read More »
In genealogy we deal with information. Not just any information but information about, and perhaps more importantly, by people. Sometimes people choose to record, sometimes they choose not to record. Sometimes people choose to pass information to the person making the record, sometimes they choose otherwise. Then we choose to look in one place for
Drinking a Filtered Brew Read More »
“…as daylight began to dawn…a bloodcurdling yell of a large band…on ponies and firing at everyone that showed his head…” Poring over newspapers sometimes turns up something exciting. In this case, the news was not exactly fresh. It was not news. It was a recollection of something that had happened over thirty years before. It
The Tale is in the Tellings Read More »
I’ve been considering writing a post about the joys of old newspapers. If I had a dollar for ever chuckle I’ve gotten from ads for “Mrs. Bailey’s Liver Pills” and their myriad competitors in the apparently vast liver pill market, I would be a very rich indeed. Of course, there is so much information about
“Scribe succeeded scribe…” Read More »
Everyone loves a eureka moment. But what is it that makes a eureka moment? There are many, many answers to that question. Anytime that something makes a sudden move from being “invisible” to “right there,” it can give that Eureka feeling. I don’t know how long it takes on average for a genealogist to have
The word leverage can be used in many ways. It means one thing in finance, another in social relationships. The original sense comes from engineering. It is simply the way in which a force can be made more effective through he use of a lever. At its simplest, a lever is a rigid rod that
How we mark time can be a very cultural thing. Today we think of June as the month for weddings. In the Irish parish registers that I have been reading of late, the weddings just pile up one on top of the other, but not in June, in February. Then nothing for weeks. Lent had