Strix Noctua

night owl by audubon
Strix Noctua, The Little Night Owl by Audubon

A few years ago I proposed that the pushmi-pullyu should be the official mascot of genealogy. There is something that happens to me over and over again, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. In its honor, I’ve delayed this post until night has fallen. It has also made me realize that genealogy also needs an official bird, and I think I know what it should be.

There is something about the approach of bedtime that brings discovery. The more I tell myself that it is time to shutdown for the night, the more likely I am to discover something really exciting, something that means I can’t go to bed just yet. I have to make notes. I have to see how this changes things. New ideas start raining down, they need to be checked before they are forgotten. Is it just a coincidence? Is it just the way that many of us are? I found some quotes that seem to summarize some of the reasons for this strange phenomenon.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon.
—Dr. Seuss

Maybe the ever-wise Dr. Seuss had part of the solution. Research is absorbing. It is so tempting to just keep going, not realizing how late it has become. Maybe that big late-night discovery is like that old joke- “Where did you find it?” “The last place I looked.” Yep, if you keep going until you find something big, it just might get late.

Research is the name given the crystal formed when the night’s worry is added to the day’s sweat.
—Martin H. Fischer

I’m not sure about the worry part of this quote, I’d substitute the word “creativity,” but maybe the reason that the discoveries seem so often to come late, is that they come after a whole day’s diligent preparation. Nothing surprising about that. Late night discoveries aren’t isolated, effortless epiphanies. They come after hours of careful preparation and study.

Night time is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.
—Catherine O’Hara

Ah yes, the later it becomes, the fewer the distractions. No more odd jobs to do. No more plumbers to call. The kids are in bed. The ideas are all ours.

Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The night can be the poets muse. Sometimes research is all logic and data. The night seems to bring out different patterns of thought, more, or at least differently, poetic than the day. In the end, one still needs the straight logical lines and the data they connect, but sometimes a little nighttime wondering, curving off in different directions, can lead to those logical connections. At night we think just a bit differently.

It is one of life’s bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.
—Lemony Snicket

Lemony Snicket encapsulated much of what I remember about bedtime from when I was a kid. Perhaps those old habits die hard. It may be only my personal preference, but I don’t think I would be alone in thinking that the night owl ought to be the official bird of genealogy.

When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.
―Khushwant Singh

So, fellow genealogical night owls (strix noctua genealogicus?), may those thoughts twinkle like stars.

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