Research Mindset
« Previous EntriesIgnorance is Bliss
Sunday, May 6th, 2012What 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 [...]
Devils in the Details
Sunday, April 22nd, 2012Last 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 [...]
Old Time Compassion
Monday, April 9th, 2012Genealogy 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 [...]
Learning and Imagining
Sunday, March 4th, 2012“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 [...]
The Finding-Knowing Gap
Sunday, February 5th, 2012Across 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 [...]
Researching the Undead
Sunday, January 29th, 2012In 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. [...]
Path of Least Persistence
Sunday, January 15th, 2012The 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 [...]
The Path of Logic
Sunday, January 8th, 2012I’ve taken a bit of a holiday hiatus from writing about research. So far, I’ve written about repeatability, openness, goals, and searching the literature. Another important part of research is the logical path that connects the evidence signposts together and leads to the conclusion. Part of the research process is to pave that path and [...]
Goal!
Sunday, December 11th, 2011Another facet of research is that it starts with a goal. The goal may be fairly general. For example it might be to gather information about a certain surname in a certain area and during a certain time period. Often, though, the goal relates to a hypothesis. Goals and Hypotheses In most research a hypothesis [...]
Genealogy Literati
Sunday, December 4th, 2011Literati, (plural noun) – well-educated people who are interested in literature. One of the most important things about open research is that it makes it possible not just to check research but to avoid repeating it unknowingly. In science, no one wants to turn in a grant proposal for an experiment only to be informed [...]
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