I suppose everyone has had the experience of learning something new and suddenly that little fact seems to pop up everywhere. That experience has just happened to me again, so I’ve been inspired to write about it. A few posts back I wrote about This Republic of Suffering, about death and dying in mid-nineteenth century […]
That Flash of Recognition Read More »
Now that the fourth installment of Faces of America has aired and the American version of Who Do you Think You Are? has begun, I feel like kicking back and thinking about what I have seen and heard. Mostly I’ve been thinking about how family history and television interact. I think to enjoy genealogy on
Thoughts on Enjoying Genealogy on TV Read More »
A recent email conversation has started me thinking about one of my favorite topics—thinking about data and ideas. It also reminded me that I had been planning to write a post about Karl Popper awhile back and just never got around to it. I enjoy bringing other disciplines into my thinking about family history and
Discover, Disbelieve, Disprove, Repeat Read More »
What makes a place a place? While writing A Very Porous Border I couldn’t help but think about what we mean by the concept of a place and, after that post, the natural example for me to use comes from the two largest countries in North America. Today we take the existence of Canada and
Watching the Vancouver Olympics, it seems quite natural to both cheer and be excited both for your country and for whoever turns in a great performance. Sometimes we confine ourselves to our national borders, other times an amazing achievement transcends any man-made boundaries. Searching for the history of our families can also be a time
A Very Porous Border Read More »
I like to write about research skills and knowledge that are even more basic than what are normally thought of as genealogy skills. Before you can piece together a difficult family you might need to know the big difference between the 1880 census and the ones that came before it (it gives relationships between members
The Fable of Either and Or Read More »
So what, you might be asking, is a “SemiDB” supposed to be? Semi, of course means half, or partial. DB is database, that friend of researchers of all shapes, sizes and persuasions. SemiDB is the name I use for databases that, for one reason or another, don’t contain as much as you might think. Some
A funny thing happened to me on the way home from the library the other day. I’d been working in some genealogy databases—typing away, looking through the search results, then more typing… After doing what I’d planned to do, it was time to walk home. On the way, I thought of a psychology lecture I’d
Shooing Away Your Inner Pigeon Read More »
It’s been said many times in genealogical circles that it is important to keep track of who an ancestor’s associates were. You never know when they will lead you to or even be previously unknown relatives. There are many places to find your ancestors’ associates. The one I’m thinking about at the moment is the
“…they burned the house to the ground! With the people inside! It was terrible!” When he was a teenager, John Phillip Colletta’s Grandma Ring told the him the tale of the death of her own grandfather. It was a gruesome tale of a small but deadly slave uprising, murder and arson. It also wasn’t strictly