Do you ever think about the occurrences that made you possible? It would be a very, very long list. What if you just concentrate on the odd ones—things with really low probability or very extreme outcomes that are just plain out of the ordinary? What strange things needed to happen to make you possible? I’ve […]
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.
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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
I just ran across a scrap of paper as I cleaned out some boxes. I’m not sure when I wrote it, though it was sometime before moving back to the U.S. from Sweden a couple years ago. At the time, I was intending to start this blog at some point after the move and I’m
On a family trip over the Columbus Day weekend, I thought I’d bring along a good book that didn’t relate to genealogy or even history. It turns out that I failed miserably. The book was certainly fascinating but it also kept me thinking about the Personal Past. The book was Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. On page
I spend a lot of time contemplating what we can actually know about the lives of people from the past and how we can know. When trying to rebuild a person’s experiences, it is important to remember to wonder about the little places. Not just to wonder about them in the sense of realizing that
A Seemingly Insignificant Place Read More »