I guess, more like, cruel new job, keeping me from summer idyll.
Life is a series of giving one thing up to get something different. The money will be nice.
"If you are lucky enough to be a genealogist, you are lucky enough." -- Ruth Padilla
I guess, more like, cruel new job, keeping me from summer idyll.
Life is a series of giving one thing up to get something different. The money will be nice.
Warning: Swear words
Since things have been so - what's the word? - frightening lately, I've been thinking about the possibility of having to evacuate my home, perhaps in a hurry, to escape whatever foreign or domestic shitbags may be invading or whatnot.
Being prepared to leave is always a concern, although we're usually thinking of natural disasters causing such a situation, but with the current guy in charge, our chances of some dumb political thing happening within our borders just went way, way up.
Along those lines, lots of "what ifs" are popping into mind - what if, after the shit hits the fan, I can't get to Ancestry, or we don't have electricity, or while fleeing the area, I forget to bring the laptop? How will I access my family tree? Maybe at that point, we won't really be worrying about such things, but my family history research is important to me, and I will want to have a copy with me.
Paper copies will become necessary at that point, but bringing a whole stack of notebooks isn't realistic, so I've decided to do something a little different. It's probably nothing that hasn't been thought of before, but it seems like a workable solution for the above problem.
At my workplace, I bought a stack of hole-punched white 3x5 cards with dividers, loaded onto a metal ring. On each card, I wrote the name of my direct ancestors with a number (1 for Dad or Mom, 2 for Dad or Mom's father, 3 for Dad or Mom's mother), along with their birth and death info, and burial place.
So here's how a card looks:
1. DAD'S NAME
Father: 2. Dad's Father's Name
Mother: 3. Dad's Mother's Name
Born:
Died:
Burial:
The numbering system is nice because it just doubles. Any father will be double the number of his child, and any mother will be double +1.
I'm thinking of also adding spouses, children, uncles (on blue cards), aunts (on pink), first cousins, records/sources for each fact, more possibly.
At any rate, I'm feeling good about this much more portable system of analog family history records.
This is a new project I've embarked upon, hoping to make sure I have all the same information (levels, amounts, quantities, qualities) for each of my ancestors. As one does, I started with myself. Trying to decide on which details to include has been challenging, yet fun.
As a result of taking this on, new and more accurate information has been discovered: My 2nd-great grandmother Lucinda, wife of Jason Newberry, now has a last name, and parents, and a new family branch for me to explore; my 2nd-great grandmother Elizabeth Ann Zane Fox's death year has been corrected (how on earth was I a WHOLE YEAR off??).
As the years have passed, more records have been added to the various repositories, which has allowed me to see their actual death certificates, as opposed to viewing only the transposed information.
It's an ongoing process, isn't it? I'm so grateful that there just doesn't seem to be an end to genealogy projects.
While at a genealogy meeting this summer, I met a woman wearing a T-shirt on which a map of the United States was printed. She had added little stars to indicate where her ancestors were from. I want that.
Here's where my stars would be:
Vancouver, WA
Walla Walla, WA
Gillette, WY
Hysham, MT
College Place, WA
Elkton, KY
Sundance, WY
Fergus County, MT
Thedford, NE
Arlington, OR
Bridgewater, MN
Fall Branch, TN
Norfolk, NE
... and a few others.
We bought a house in August 2018, moved in September. That same week I started the second of two new jobs (#1 started in March 2018). We still have two children in school and year-round soccer, and the other three still live at home and are working and/or attending college.
To say that I've been too overwhelmed by the craziness of my life to spend much time on my genealogical research would be (this can't be stressed enough) a vast understatement.
However, I still love it, love talking about it, love remembering the exciting discoveries, the trips, the cemeteries, the stories. All of it. So much has changed in my life that my genealogy focal points are completely different now, but the love and the strong desire to find and preserve these beloved people and their stories is still very much alive.
Now if I can just get to my computer sometime soon, I'll be back in business.
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23 February 1945, Iwo Jima Photo credit: Joe Rosenthal |