There is an interesting phrase one runs into in genealogy. It is “the records are confused.” When I first started out in genealogy, back when I was a kid, I thought that was a very strange phrase. It seemed to imply that those records sat around after the courthouse closed scratching their headings and not […]
The Records are Confused Read More »
When I lived in Sweden I learned a tradition about the end of the Christmas season. Translated it goes something like this- Twentieth day Knut, Christmas is out. There are different variations on the saying, but they are all short and rhyme. Since I love calendars and the strange effects they can have on genealogy,
The Twenty Days of Christmas Read More »
This is part 2 of a multi-part post. Part one was If at First You Succeed, Try, Try Again. Another reason to keep searching, even after finding “the answer,” is that if we only look for the answers, we are limited by our ability to imagine the questions. In the sciences, there are the concepts
Often when we do a deep and thorough search for records it is because less deep and less thorough searching has not given a result. We search until we find what we were looking for and then search no further. There is another, and in the end much better, reason to make that thorough search.
If at First You Succeed, Try, Try Again Read More »
Getting into the minds of the people I research is important to me. It can help lead the way to discoveries. It also makes those people so much more real. It also helps to remind me that our ancestors were a fascinating combination of just-like-us and totally alien. If we assume that they were all
A Time to Think about Time Read More »
Sometimes the past doesn’t need to be so distant to seem far away. Cleaning out things that the kids have outgrown turned up one of those typical alphabet books that are for children that can’t yet read. The kind of book whose genealogist version might start— A is for antecedent, those things that came before.
The Genealogists’ Alphabet, part H Read More »
Genealogists spend much of there existence in “about-time,” that time that is neither known nor unknown, that twilight between mystery and understanding. Yet about-time doesn’t need to be as mysterious as it often seems. There is usually some information hiding behind the word “about.” Perfect-World Type of About-Time Where do we find “about 1811” in
A few days ago I was reading a compiled genealogy that speculated about an epidemic. It is a quite reasonable speculation. Several members of an extended family as well as some neighbors all died in the space of a few weeks. What the contagion was, or even if the speculation is correct at all, may
When a Family Dies Read More »
There is a type of genealogical problem that I think of as the shattered family. Something goes wrong, often a combination of poverty and the death of a parent, and family seems to fly apart, like shattering glass. One of the best ways to recognize the person that one is researching, is to find them
Shattered Families Read More »
There is a concept in statistical testing called “the null hypothesis.” It would be somewhat difficult to perform experiments on our ancestors to check statistically what records they would leave behind under different conditions and learn the probabilities of those records being preserved to our time. Simply put, we can’t do statistical tests on our
“If Any” and The Null Hypothesis Read More »