I like this article by James Tanner. Actually, I like most articles by James Tanner, but this one in particular. In a nutshell, “I am not denigrating genealogy in any way, I just think that the subject of doing genealogical research needs to be upgraded from a pastime to a serious pursuit on the same level…
Category: Genealogy
Foreign Origins
Our European ancestors often did genealogy as propaganda. Nowadays it’s sometimes hard to convince new genealogists, people who might have only a limited historical education, that there wasn’t some secret, oral, underground stream of tradition that has been suppressed by clumsy academics. No. It was pure propaganda, and today we can see through it easily….
Preserve First, Scan Second
This blog post stopped me in my tracks. I’m doing a huge scanning project right now. Drawers and drawers and more drawers of old paper files. All my genealogical correspondence and papers from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. A lifetime of work, and omg I was active. And now I’m helping Mom…
Royal Fakes
One of my main academic interests is the way genealogical fakes are created and preserved. For many years I was active on Geni.com, working with other volunteer curators to round up and fakes, get them corralled, and so improve the quality of the medieval tree there. In the end it turned out to be a…
Ruth Luce
Ruth (Grant) Luce was always one of my heroes. She was born in Maine the year before the American Revolution. She came west with the Mormons when she was 72 and lived another 12 years after that. She died at the age of 84, having been a pioneer of Nauvoo, Salt Lake City, and Ogden….