There is a facet of research that nags at me every so often. The other day was one of those days. Sometimes when we find something, we know exactly what it means. We can almost immediately claim that we understand it fairly well and if we are lucky and thinking clearly, we won’t need to […]
The Shoebox in No-Man’s-Land Read More »
Sometimes the path we walk with our ancestors is a bit convoluted. Sometimes that is an understatement. Often we reach a dead end and wonder why. Sometimes, though the path is correct, here and there our clues to our ancestors’ strange trajectories can turn out to be the reddest of herrings. Every virtue has a
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
As I research I often think of things to do, fragments of plans occur to me, possible research strategies start to form and ideas pop into my head. In short I think of things that I can’t do right at the moment. I probably have that in common with roughly 100% of people who do
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 »
One sailor says to another as they looked out on the ocean, “That’s a lot a water.” The other one replied, “Yep, and that’s just the top of it.” Sometimes we’re awed by the top of the water. We forget that there is more to it than that. To understand the surface, we need to
The Surface and the Deep Read More »
Coincidence n 1 : … 2 : the occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident but seem to have some connection. One of the hardest things for the human mind to grasp is that coincidences happen. We are very, very good at seeing patterns. We are very good at seeing connections.
Every genealogist knows, or should know, that keeping track of sources is a must. Each fact should have a source. There is something hidden in that last statement. It assumes we have a clear idea of what a “fact” is. Do we? Slicing and Dicing How small can a fact be? Is someone’s name a
Writing the Fine Print Read More »
In genealogy we deal with information. Not just any information but information about, and perhaps more importantly, by people. Sometimes people choose to record, sometimes they choose not to record. Sometimes people choose to pass information to the person making the record, sometimes they choose otherwise. Then we choose to look in one place for
Drinking a Filtered Brew Read More »