In honor of April Fools’ Day, I thought I might throw out some genealogical trick questions. See how you do. Is it legal in Virginia for a man to marry his widow’s sister? How many birthdays does the average man have? The average woman? Do they have a fourth of July in England? Can a […]
Why is genealogy becoming more popular? There are some trivial, if important reasons—the Internet makes it easier to get started, software makes keeping track of progress easier, those sorts of things. Sometimes when talking to people, I realize another reason is often sitting just below the surface. We are generally becoming less rooted. We no
I’ve just run across a study done a few years ago. It touches on thoughts about family history and our sense of self that I have had for a long time, but goes beyond them and shows how family stories affect a child’s development. In 2005 scientists at Emory University’s Center on Myth and Ritual in
This is, even now, not an easy post to write. When I wrote a genealogical obituary for my Aunt Melva, I was saddened but not surprised that her time had come. No one expected my father-in-law to be proclaimed terminally ill or that he would be gone so fast. Our youngest daughter had traveled to
Last year I left seriousness behind in a parody post for Christmas Eve. This year’s holiday post is a bit of a parody too but I was in a more serious mood while writing it and it came out much less silly. I could almost imagine singing this. So with apologies to the great Robert
The Genealogist’s Auld Lang Syne Read More »
The other day, a link that I clicked at just the wrong moment was dead by the time my internet connection was brought back to life hours later. I saw a number that you don’t generally want to see on the web, 404. My page was not found. But this 404 page was pretty informative.
404-Ancestor not found Read More »
Heinrich Schliemann is not a name that rolls off the English speaking tongue and his name probably doesn’t appear among your ancestors but I think that he has some interesting things to say about the genealogical research we do. Heinrich did research as well, though not genealogical. Even so, he started with oral history, exactly
Today we mark the anniversary of the end of The Great War, also known as The War to End All Wars. Before the the 1940s, it was The World War. Today we think about veterans. We think about the men and women, living and dead who served their country. As genealogists, we should be quicker
Last week I brought up motivations. Motives can be important and I don’t mean ours, though they might be important too. I mean our ancestors’ motives. It is a question that gets asked about the accused. Did he have a motive? We ask questions about our ancestors motives all the time. Why did they emigrate?
The title for this post is stolen with pride. I’ve been reading Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography), by the director Errol Morris. I knew I had to read the book after hearing several interviews with him that touched on his almost maniacal pursuit of the correct order of a pair of
Observations on Mysteries Read More »