New Year’s Eve is the proper moment to contemplate time. There is nothing logical in this. There is no great discontinuity in anything but our calendar as the clock strikes twelve but the feeling is right. All the better if eyes are bathed, as mine are now, in the ancient light of far away stars. […]
“…they burned the house to the ground! With the people inside! It was terrible!” When he was a teenager, John Phillip Colletta’s Grandma Ring told the him the tale of the death of her own grandfather. It was a gruesome tale of a small but deadly slave uprising, murder and arson. It also wasn’t strictly
My first reason to “shred” documents (that is to look closely at each statement a source makes) was that it forces you to be aware of the details. The second reason to shred documents was to allow you to get a sense of the truthfulness of each statement on its own merit. The third reason
Shredding Documents, Part 3 Read More »
My first reason to “shred” documents (that is to look closely at each statement a source makes) was that it forces you to be aware of the details. The second reason to shred your documents is that each bit of information in them has a different chance of being correct. If you lump each individual
Shredding Documents, Part 2 Read More »
I was just catching up on the Sunday paper (yes, it is Wednesday, I’ve been a bit busy). The Chicago Tribune ran a story entitled Google Maps inexplicably mixes Chicago’s past, present. It turns out that there are more than a few anachronisms lurking in Google Maps. Some of the places labeled on Google’s version
Ye Olde Google Maps Read More »
Awhile back, in Do Your Documents Have a Shady Past, I mentioned that documents exist both as a collection of individual pieces of information and as a unified whole. That whole has a history of its own. After considering a document, or in fact, any source as a whole, all those separate items of information
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I love words. Like people they have origins and even genealogies. They even have family groups and cousins both close and distant. They have ancestors and many will leave descendants. Words have their own personalities—definitions, shades of meaning and special ways of behaving. They change as they grow older. When reading an old document it
Dour about Dowers? Read More »
When most family historians think of gathering information, they think of looking for written documents. There are other places to look, other things that are not documents but that are fine places to find information. Your source for much of what you learn as you first start out in family history should be relatives. Talking
Going to the Source Read More »
I wonder how many people remember why we have Veterans Day when we do. After years of war, on “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” the guns fell silent on the Western Front and for all practical purposes, World War I—The Great War, the War to End All Wars—came to
I am always trying to get into the heads of the people that I’m researching and one of the best ways of doing that is through living history. Go out and visit a place that resembles somewhere that an ancestor lived or, if you are truly lucky, you might even find that there is some