![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So, groggy morning. Christine called me away from the puzzle of genealogy just in time last night. ... oh, no, sucked in again.
I am being pedantic, trying to build up a tree from strictly referenced material, avoiding referencing random genealogical trees. Of course, it's not like the 1890-something published biography is going to be any more reliable than someone else's family bible. I have a hard time, though, identifying when people are working from solid references and when people are working from other random trees on the web. I see trees with really odd dates and i begin to wonder if someone thought the same name in the same locale was good enough to be the same person. I imagine building up one solid tree and then moving on to speculative branches and keeping those in separate data structures.
I know, though, that i'm lucky that the folks in this Georgia frontier quickly became so settled that they were writing books about the early settlers a hundred years ago. I'm going to quickly find it hard to build from sources. The census is a really wonderful tool and Ancestry.com's access to the images and transliteration is great: but this is the challenge of same name, same county -- but is it the same person? (Particularly when stretching back to the next generation.)
I'm fortunate on my mom's side to have found that apparently one patriarch grew landed and wealthy and had a passel of kids -- and after his death it looks like his will was taken to the Georgia Supreme Court more than once.
So, that was the delightful diversion.
Otherwise, i feel my mind shying away from facing the week. There is nothing horrible, but i think what i shy away from is realizing how many things i took a break from. I spent some time talking to a friend about overwhelm -- i had written her when she had asked for help with her sense of overwhelm. She rarely feels it, and went to offer tips, etc to me, now that she's out of her stuck spot. But i know the things like break into small chunks and, to some extent, i think i prioritize. Practice is different from knowing, and practice when my brain is so strongly programmed in a dysfunctional way is hard.
I am being pedantic, trying to build up a tree from strictly referenced material, avoiding referencing random genealogical trees. Of course, it's not like the 1890-something published biography is going to be any more reliable than someone else's family bible. I have a hard time, though, identifying when people are working from solid references and when people are working from other random trees on the web. I see trees with really odd dates and i begin to wonder if someone thought the same name in the same locale was good enough to be the same person. I imagine building up one solid tree and then moving on to speculative branches and keeping those in separate data structures.
I know, though, that i'm lucky that the folks in this Georgia frontier quickly became so settled that they were writing books about the early settlers a hundred years ago. I'm going to quickly find it hard to build from sources. The census is a really wonderful tool and Ancestry.com's access to the images and transliteration is great: but this is the challenge of same name, same county -- but is it the same person? (Particularly when stretching back to the next generation.)
I'm fortunate on my mom's side to have found that apparently one patriarch grew landed and wealthy and had a passel of kids -- and after his death it looks like his will was taken to the Georgia Supreme Court more than once.
So, that was the delightful diversion.
Otherwise, i feel my mind shying away from facing the week. There is nothing horrible, but i think what i shy away from is realizing how many things i took a break from. I spent some time talking to a friend about overwhelm -- i had written her when she had asked for help with her sense of overwhelm. She rarely feels it, and went to offer tips, etc to me, now that she's out of her stuck spot. But i know the things like break into small chunks and, to some extent, i think i prioritize. Practice is different from knowing, and practice when my brain is so strongly programmed in a dysfunctional way is hard.
Tags: