Trying to fail may sound like a truly odd concept. Trying to do it fast probably sounds even more bizarre, but there is a point to it. When a problem itself is even remotely interesting, the solution is often not something that is easy to find. Many documents might be needed and little shards of […]
It can be wise for the family historian to think a little about the future of the past they are reconstructing in the present. You can read the letters that were once in a box in grandma’s attic. You can look at the photographs found in your uncle’s desk drawer. Those things could be a
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A few years ago about this time of year, when independence is an important word, I wrote a post about data independence—the idea that only independent data improves our knowledge. When data all derives from the same source it is dependent. More dependent data does nothing to help us move our research forward. I’ve been
The other day a client whose Swedish ancestry I’ve been investigating asked me to take on a project researching in Norwegian records. Norwegian research isn’t something I’d done before except for a document here or there but with that full disclosure, I said I would take a look. Getting into new records is always interesting.
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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
I didn’t start out to write a two part post but this post has become part 2 of last weeks about the nonfiction contract. What inspired this post, and last week’s as well, are a couple of recent run-ins with some nineteenth century “nonfiction.” Clearly standards were different over one hundred years ago and 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
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It is a long weekend in the U.S. The one that traditionally starts the summer. For many it is a weekend for getting into the car and driving, sometimes down expressways, sometimes down smaller, winding roads. As a child one of the things that fascinated me about driving vacations was how once one returned to
Records evolve. Some records are created to preserve specific information. These certainly change over time. Go far enough back in time and death records might not give the cause of death, something you expect to see today. Other records are created to gather statistics. These, it seems, evolve much faster. If one simply wants to
I found a reference to a man, Anders, that I was researching. It was a reference to his drowning. I checked the death registers for the date that was given and sure enough, he was listed. So were two other men. There was a note squeezed into the margin. It was hard to read but