Myth and Meaning
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Sunday, March 10th, 2013Why is genealogy becoming more popular? There are some trivial, if important reasons—the Internet makes it easier to get started, software makes keeping track of progress easier, those sorts of things. Sometimes when talking to people, I realize another reason is often sitting just below the surface. We are generally becoming less rooted. We no [...]
The Sense of Self
Sunday, March 3rd, 2013I’ve just run across a study done a few years ago. It touches on thoughts about family history and our sense of self that I have had for a long time, but goes beyond them and shows how family stories affect a child’s development. In 2005 scientists at Emory University’s Center on Myth and Ritual in [...]
Learning from Family History
Sunday, February 24th, 2013What does family history teach us? What do we learn from it? One thing that it can do is to teach us about life in ways we find hard to dismiss. There are many hypotheses about why people love fiction. Many of those ideas probably contribute to the full answer. Fiction can be an escape [...]
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 [...]
Can You Ever Really Return?
Sunday, June 17th, 2012I was just looking back over the post I wrote almost exactly a year ago. I had taken a twenty mile bike ride with my daughter and written about how the speed we traveled and the nature we saw made me think about how my ancestors would have seen this part of the country as [...]
Immortality, Genealogy and Technology
Sunday, June 10th, 2012Two things happened to me the other day that prompted some thinking. I heard an ad for a BBC radio play about a fictional meeting between Thomas Edison and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Edison wished to record the aged Tennyson reciting some of his famous poems, such as The Charge of the Light Brigade. Tennyson wavered [...]
Life, Death and Genealogy
Sunday, March 11th, 2012This week, true to the name of the blog, I’ll be meditating. It has been a busy week. I’m working on several projects, gave a talk and have three more coming up that need preparation. I attended a genealogy get-together at our library, have an article for a quarterly to write and on Wednesday I [...]
Personal Provenance
Sunday, December 18th, 2011I’m taking a break from thinking about the nature of research this week to think about something else. Where do things get there value? Part of the value of something clearly comes from the value of the raw materials and the cost of the labor that went into making it. Part of the value of [...]
Quirks of Fate
Sunday, November 14th, 2010Do you ever think about the occurrences that made you possible? It would be a very, very long list. What if you just concentrate on the odd ones—things with really low probability or very extreme outcomes that are just plain out of the ordinary? What strange things needed to happen to make you possible? I’ve [...]
Family Stories, Ethnic Traditions and Easter Witches
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010This last Thursday, my children did what they always do on Maundy Thursday (the Thursday before Easter). They put on old skirts and aprons. They each put their hair up in a kerchief. They each got a basket, a toy cat and a broom. With a little makeup they became “Easter Witches.” Then they did [...]
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