I’ve been analyzing some letters between a husband and wife. The wife’s brother is someone I’m researching and the siblings ancestry isn’t clear. Researching her should help me with him. She is also important in her own right to the story I want to tell. In these letters, they mention relatives and that should be […]
Less Is More, More Is Less Read More »
I’ve gotten several requests lately to do an introductory presentation on genealogy. That got me to thinking about what is truly basic to getting started. People seem to like rules that come in threes. There are Kepler’s Three Laws of Planetary Motion, Newton’s Three Laws of Motion, Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and the Three
The Three Laws of Genealogy Read More »
A few things related to bias and understanding data have recently hinted to me that it is time to return to Mathmagic Land. Bias is something that scientists and historians need to think about. It can be in the data, or it can appear in what we do with the data and how we think
Return to Mathmagic Land Read More »
(This is the second part of a three part series. You can find the first part at The Census Goes to War.) I admit that I am fascinated by the Civil War. The scale was so far beyond anything America had known before. In the two days of the Battle of Shiloh, more Americans fell
Seven Score and Ten Read More »
I just gave a talk about understanding and using maps. Most of my examples were from maps of North America but some were from countries that contributed immigrants to this side of the Atlantic. That is, they were maps of “the old country.” It is an interesting phrase because it sounds like a nickname for
Another St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone. My kids are quite aware of being Swedish. They were born in Sweden after all. They’ve also been told more than once that their ancestry is more German than anything else. This time of year though, I get to remind them that they are part Irish as
The Luck of the Irish Read More »
I’ve been preparing a new talk about maps and one of the things I will discuss is using Sanborn Maps. I have the images for my father’s home town from a few years before he was born. I also have the census that was taken a few months after he came into the world. Censuses
Taking Walks with the Census Taker and my Dad Read More »
Getting back across the Atlantic is always a challenge. Immigrants’ names changed under the influence of English phonetics and naming patterns. Some intentionally picked names easier for their new neighbors to pronounce, names less foreign and more easily accepted. It was a long voyage and the great separation made it seem unimportant to record, with
Crisscrossing the Atlantic Read More »
I started out to write a post about George Washington’s and Abraham Lincoln’s families in honor of Presidents’ Day. I soon learned that just defining what is meant by “Presidents’ Day” is not so easy. Presidents’ Day The Federal holiday this Monday is officially called Washington’s Birthday, remembering his birthday of February 22nd. Oddly, when
I like thinking about thinking. A few lines I wrote and then deleted in a report reminded me of some concepts that come up when thinking about proving a hypothesis. The sentences that I erased went something like this—”Though the year in her birth record is two years before the one claimed or implied by
Two Words, Too Many Meanings Read More »