Genealogy
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Sunday, October 21st, 2012The 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 [...]
Conserving Ancestors
Sunday, October 14th, 2012A few weeks ago I was looking at a photograph with a client. It isn’t your ordinary snapshot. It measures about one foot by three feet. It is also about one hundred years old. It also had a problem. It has been rolled up in a cardboard tube for decades and is now both a [...]
Home Away from Home
Sunday, October 7th, 2012The other day I heard a book mentioned. The title was At Home in the Universe. There are two books by that title and I have no way of knowing which one had been mentioned but it struck me as an interesting title. Home can mean many things, where you grew up, where you live [...]
The Surface and the Deep
Sunday, September 30th, 2012One 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 [...]
Two Births
Sunday, September 23rd, 2012Last week I wrote about “the two deaths.” This week it has occurred to me that I could try to turn that on its head. If the concept of two deaths can make sense, what about the idea of two births? The first birth, like the first death, would be physical. The second death is [...]
The Two Deaths
Sunday, September 16th, 2012The other day I ran across a new concept that I’ve thought about many times before. I suppose the right way to put it is that I heard it put in a new way. I also heard it in French and that always seems to make a thought sound profound. (Unless, of course, French is [...]
Coincidence
Sunday, September 9th, 2012Coincidence 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. [...]
Sources and Searches
Sunday, September 2nd, 2012Last week I was thinking about lists and logs. I also spent a little time thinking about where I store the information about my sources. I’ve even drawn flow charts to try to streamline what I do and think about my routines. This week I’ve been thinking about information about sources, and how that process [...]
Fear and Loathing in Logs Vegas
Sunday, August 26th, 2012Today I thought I would write about what is clearly the single most exciting topic in all of genealogy. What would that be? What have I written so much about? That’s right, checklists and research logs! What, I ask, could possibly be more exciting than those? Either I’ve gone hopelessly insane or I’m not being [...]
A Tale of Twenty-Two Documents
Sunday, August 19th, 2012One of the biggest problems in genealogical research is deciding how much is enough. We all deal with it. How much dedicated searching before you decided that a record simply doesn’t exist? How long do you spend on a difficult to read document? How many documents relating to the same fact are enough? I know [...]
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