So you’ve found some new genealogical evidence. Time to put it into your database and start the next hunt. Or is it? What if someone handed you a new and strange physical object and said, “Here. This is for you. I think you’ll need it.” You probably wouldn’t just make a note “Received interesting object” […]
I just ran across a year-old copy of American Heritage magazine. It is a history magazine not a genealogy magazine but history and genealogy continuously impact each other. What has happened affected and was affected by the relationships between the people to whom it happened. In this particular issue (winter 2010) there are thirty-five articles
A Ripple that Spread on this Side of the Pond Read More »
Two events of the past week make me feel that the Fates have decided that this week’s post will be about libraries. I’m a self-confessed library junkie. My local library, only blocks away, shut down months ago for renovations and the building of an addition. In the meantime, there was a “Temporary Library Center” in
Libraries and the Pajamas-Centered Genealogist Read More »
I ran across a quote recently that got me thinking about the extraordinary. In an episode of Cosmos Carl Sagan said, Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is a catchy phrase. I think it is fairly clear what that little statement is trying to get across, though it perhaps isn’t so precise. What is missing
The Sagan Doctrine Read More »
Work I’ve been doing for some clients recently has got me thinking about a way that I sometimes do research when connections are hard to make. I think of this method as “painting ancestors.” I don’t mean portrait painting. I mean something more along the lines of house painting. These days painting woodwork with oil
Painting the Past Read Read More »
All the holidays at this time of year have gotten me thinking about interviewing relatives. Part of the art of interviewing relatives is to recognize when the flow of the interview is going in an good direction even if it isn’t where you planned for it to go. It may not be the information that
Holiday Interviews Read More »
I’ve had the privilege of working with some letters lately. Many, many letters. Letters of an age that sent a wave of disbelief through me every time I picked one up and I picked up hundreds. Every letter had a different feel. Some were written on paper so ethereal that I couldn’t believe that they
When people think of creativity they often limit themselves to art. Painting, literature, music and dance are the kinds of things that come easily to mind when one thinks of creativity. Other activities come less often to mind when we think of creativity. For example, people often believe that science is not a creative endeavor,
Presumably everyone reading this has heard of the Renaissance—the great flowering of learning and investigation that followed the medieval period and went back to and improved upon Western Culture’s classical roots. Few know that this was at least the second try at a renaissance since the fall of Rome. The first try didn’t go quite
Paleography and the “G-Word” Read More »
People who study statistics often talk about distributions. They are simply the shapes that appear when you turn data into a picture. Each bit of information might be marked down where it belongs on a number line. With enough data a pattern may emerge. That pattern may have many things to say about underlying causes
Wagging the Long Tail Read More »