Even in the past, things change. Not events, they either happened or they didn’t. What changes is how we remember the past and how we preserve the records of the past. If you look at an image of a record at home on your computer screen, you are very likely looking at a digital image […]
Something Old, Something New… Read More »
Genealogy is based on information. No information, no genealogy. The ancestors are still there, but without information, they have faded to invisibility. We use whatever information we can find to take the next step and build up our knowledge of our ancestors, of our personal past. Sometimes it is not too difficult to piece together
Part of the very recent history of my family is my oldest daughter’s love for planets when she was little. Every night I read to her from my old National Geographic planet book. When that wore out, she insisted on being read to from the pages that were still held together by broken bits of
A few years ago I proposed that the pushmi-pullyu should be the official mascot of genealogy. There is something that happens to me over and over again, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. In its honor, I’ve delayed this post until night has fallen. It has also made me realize that genealogy also needs
My family and I took a trip over the long Thanksgiving weekend to visit friends. Nothing unusual about that. As often happens when we travel somewhere, I realized that we have a family connection to the area. The connection was made by a family that I seem to be following. We’ve visited them in Illinois,
I just watched an interesting video. It was not at all about family history and yet it was one of those times when the parallels jumped out at me. The speaker was a philosopher that discussed a story known as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the idea of metacognition, that is, thinking about thinking. Whether
Thinking about Thinking Read More »
Last year at this time, I wondered when my “tradition” of starting my blogiversary post with a short real post and then a few thoughts on my favorite posts from the past year would become an official tradition. Well, I think at year five of this blog, I need to admit that it is a
Once I’m a Distant Ancestor and Blogiversary V Read More »
When I lived in France and before I had kids, I had a large map of Europe that I mounted on a sheet of corrugated cardboard. I had it hanging on the wall and every time I visited a new place, I stuck a pin into that spot. To add a bit of information, I
It’s 10 p.m. Do You Know Where You Are Researching? Read More »
We got an email from Germany this week. It said that after 2 1/2 years of work, they had finished the graphic novel that contains part of my children’s great-grandfather’s diary from WWI. The goal is to interest young people in their history, something that we as family historians deal with often. It tells the
We research our ancestors to learn the facts about them, about their lives, their times, the places they lived, their occupations, and travels. The list, as they say, goes on. First we gather documents that are clearly relevant. Then we gather documents that are more subtly related to our ancestors. Though we may never finish
The Nonfiction Contract Read More »