“…as daylight began to dawn…a bloodcurdling yell of a large band…on ponies and firing at everyone that showed his head…” Poring over newspapers sometimes turns up something exciting. In this case, the news was not exactly fresh. It was not news. It was a recollection of something that had happened over thirty years before. It […]
The Tale is in the Tellings Read More »
The word leverage can be used in many ways. It means one thing in finance, another in social relationships. The original sense comes from engineering. It is simply the way in which a force can be made more effective through he use of a lever. At its simplest, a lever is a rigid rod that
“An eastern exchange remarks that Kansas first had border ruffians, then Indian massacres, then tornadoes, grasshoppers, prairie fires, drouth, potato bugs, the exodusters, horse thieves and prohibition and it only lacks a nice small-pox epidemic to complete the set.” I read that in a Kansas newspaper published in 1882. Perhaps it is not the most
What is more important in research, what we know or what we don’t know? Learning something new in genealogy always leads to more questions than it answers. There is always more that we don’t know than what we know. Every bit of information leads to the hope that more details can be discovered. Finding a
Ignorance is Bliss Read More »
Last week, I was starting to investigate a client’s family story. It was remembered as a case of manslaughter, though not in so many words. It was supposedly committed by a man who married into the family that I was researching. It turned out to involve death threats, a brutal, premeditated murder and the prospect
Devils in the Details Read More »
Genealogy can surprise us. We often get quite different perspectives on the people in our personal past from what we might have gotten had we lived in their day. I think it would be an unusual genealogist that didn’t at some point wish that they could journey back in time to meet an ancestor. Often
Old Time Compassion Read More »
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” -Albert Einstein That is an intriguing quote. When you first encounter it, that quote doesn’t have the feel of something that a scientist, a pursuer of knowledge, would say. Surely, dreaming of polka-dotted unicorns is not what he was putting above knowledge. It isn’t really. There is more to
Learning and Imagining Read More »
Across my office on a bookshelf, I have a book called The Knowing-Doing Gap. Not surprisingly, it is about the difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it. It is a book about management, not about genealogy but I was reminded of it the other day. What reminded me was a thought or
The Finding-Knowing Gap Read More »
In a big project that I’ve been working on, there has been a large cast of supporting characters. People who weren’t goals of the research but who were necessary to the research. Now, as I work on the book that is based on that research, I’ve realized that I have left a few people hanging.
Researching the Undead Read More »
The next time you meet someone who is fairly new to research, try to notice what mode they are in. You just might be able to help them out a bit. By “mode,” I’m thinking of the classic optimist/pessimist difference that is contained in the old question about the glass—is it half-empty of half-full? Almost
Path of Least Persistence Read More »