Oh My! Oh Maya!
Once again the world has failed to end on schedule. Now I guess I’d better write a blog post. I love calendars, I’m not equally fond of the end of the world. I love using calendar peculiarities to...
View ArticlePuzzles and Panoramas
One of the most common analogies for what genealogists do involves jigsaw puzzles. We say that we find the pieces and carefully fit them together to prove facts about people’s lives and the...
View ArticleGoals
Sometimes in genealogy, life gets in the way. Sad I know, but true. This will be a short post in honor of this week’s “living” a.k.a. flood recovery, a gas leak resulting in gutting the kitchen, two...
View ArticleWatching for Bumps in the Road
One of the tricky things to deal with in any research is evidence that leads you astray. There are some things in genealogy to avoid some such problems. We try to understand how records are created and...
View Article950 Hours, Almost One Hundred Years Ago
Just about every year at this time, I write something about the First World War. The anniversary of the end of that horror is the reason that Veterans Day falls on the 11th of November. Last year, the...
View ArticleGenealogy on Little Cat Feet
The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. -Fog by Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, 1916 Often in genealogy, one takes great,...
View ArticleBlessed are the Indexers
Everyone loves a good index. Occasionally, we love to hate them but still have to confess that they are vital. These days when we think about an index, we usually think of a searchable database. When...
View ArticleThe Attrition of Facts
When I studied ancient history in this university many years ago, I had as a special subject “Greece in the period of the Persian Wars.” I collected fifteen or twenty volumes on my shelves and took it...
View ArticleNature vs Nurture
I’m getting ready to give a talk about understanding the use of DNA in genealogical research. It is one thing to just jump right into DNA. It is another to wrap your head around it. One thing I’ve...
View ArticleWhile the Shutter is Closed
Sometimes one hears that the census is like getting a snapshot of a family taken every ten years. The time between “exposures” does change from place to place but many countries have settled into the...
View ArticleFinding Your Way Home
Often in genealogy we are trying to “find our way home” in a rather poetic sense. It is the broad where-are-my-roots sense. “Home” is our ancestors’ names, ethnicities, religions, and cultures. In...
View ArticleThe Genealogists’ Alphabet, part D
Sometimes the past doesn’t need to be so distant to seem far away. Cleaning out things that the kids have outgrown turned up one of those typical alphabet books that are for kids that can’t yet read....
View ArticlePuzzles and Panoramas
One of the most common analogies for what genealogists do involves jigsaw puzzles. We say that we find the pieces and carefully fit them together to prove facts about people’s lives and the...
View ArticleFading
It had been a long time since I have missed my regular weekly post, if I ever have, but last week I missed. There is a reason. Life, or rather the end of life, takes priority. Four and a half years...
View ArticleGoals
Sometimes in genealogy, life gets in the way. Sad I know, but true. This will be a short post in honor of this week’s “living” a.k.a. flood recovery, a gas leak resulting in gutting the kitchen, two...
View ArticleWatching for Bumps in the Road
One of the tricky things to deal with in any research is evidence that leads you astray. There are some things in genealogy to avoid some such problems. We try to understand how records are created and...
View Article950 Hours, Almost One Hundred Years Ago
Just about every year at this time, I write something about the First World War. The anniversary of the end of that horror is the reason that Veterans Day falls on the 11th of November. Last year, the...
View ArticleGenealogy on Little Cat Feet
The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. -Fog by Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, 1916 Often in genealogy, one takes great,...
View ArticleBlessed are the Indexers
Everyone loves a good index. Occasionally, we love to hate them but still have to confess that they are vital. These days when we think about an index, we usually think of a searchable database. When...
View ArticleThe Attrition of Facts
When I studied ancient history in this university many years ago, I had as a special subject “Greece in the period of the Persian Wars.” I collected fifteen or twenty volumes on my shelves and took it...
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