Land records can be a great place to find evidence of relationships between people but I am going to write about a part of land records that normally makes the eyes glaze over. In many places, such as the eastern U.S., land holdings were not specified by the convenient lines derived from latitude and longitude […]
Knowing by Metes and Bounds Read More »
I just ran across an article in an old newsletter that I found among my aunt’s papers. The title was Quantum Genealogy and as a former research physicist, it caught, or perhaps even grabbed, my eye. The article mostly discussed the author’s research experiences without so many references to the quantum world, so in my
Being a “modern person” means many things. One of them seems to be being as independent as possible of the forces of nature. That is nothing new, after all you could say that putting a roof above your head is a separation from nature and people have been doing that for a very long time.
Migration Routes for City Dwellers Read More »
Independence is an important topic this time of year. Though inspired by that 4th of July kind of independence that is not what I’m thinking about. Instead, I’m thinking about data independence. As we gather our evidence, one question that always needs to be asked is, “is this data independent of the data already collected?”
There is a little bit of unresearch I like to do every so often. It can be a simple what-if or a real exercise in going through my records, notes and thinking. It is not hard to get the idea. You experiment with the life of an ancestor that you think you understand fairly well.
Doing Some Unresearch Read More »
It seems that whenever my family travels, I find some tie to our family history. When my wife mentioned wanting to see something of Minnesota, I said, “Fine, I know just where I want to go.” Luckily our children all enjoy historical buildings and living history. This time my place of pilgrimage was Fort Snelling.
A few days ago, I was chatting with an architect and he mentioned how useful Sanborn Maps are for historical preservation. I said something about having looked at them and we chatted a bit more and I started describing some details that I’d seen in the maps. Eventually, I could tell something suddenly clicked. He
A Memory Trip Down Any Lane Read More »
Memorial Day has just come and gone. I took my kids for a bike ride to the nearby cemetery. There, four of their great-grandparents, one great-great-grandparent and several of their great aunts and uncles lie buried. The main family plot is easy enough for me to find but one of my uncles is buried elsewhere
Quite a few of my posts of late have been of the how-to type. This time I’m feeling a bit more philosophical, more questioning than answering. Perhaps the biggest question that exists is “Why?” Three letters and a question mark, no more, and it can be asked without any particular point or direction. Narrowing it
Not How-to but Why-do? Read More »
I just had a little run in with a new kind of error while checking something for a client. The error came from an index and because of the way in which it probably appeared, that error has gotten me thinking about how the technology we use affects the errors we make and, therefore, the
A Brief History of Oops Read More »