On to Plan B

Or is it Plan C?  I’ve exhausted my latest strategy for finding more Dachtera ancestors in Poland.  I’m still re-reading films that I read many years ago, but I seem to have gotten whatever there is to get from them. Now I’ll order films from other nearby parishes.  The BaSIA project in Poland tells where families with a given surname are located in the country. Naturally, my focus has been on the areas where my name is the most dense, but if I have no luck, I guess I’ll need to look to other towns.

One idea was to try to identify the age range in order to narrow down the range of years to look for births and marriages.  But that’s pretty loose.  A man probably married between the ages of 20 and 30.  He could have fathered children for 30 years or more.  The range is very broad.  I’ll have to look very carefully at all of the records so as not to miss a clue somewhere.

It will take a couple of weeks for microfilms to arrive so, while waiting, I’ll shift gears and go back to the Rose family – they’ve not had any attention for a while.  Maybe the time away from them will give me a fresh perspective there. 

This Child’s Christmas

When I was little, we didn’t really have many Christmas traditions. We were in a Chicago suburb.  All the rest of the family was in St. Paul, MN. - we moved away in 1946.  There was no Grandma’s house to go to, no cousins to play with.  From age four to ten Christmas was just Mom, Dad and me.

I don’t remember Christmas dinners but I’m sure that Mom served something that was a tradition for her. As a kid, I wasn’t a foodie.

We’d go to Midnight Mass and then to bed; and I’d try to get to sleep quickly so that Christmas morning would arrive  

Before I entered first grade, Mom explained the truth about Santa because she was concerned that other kids would spoil it for me if I still believed.  I was sworn to secrecy so as not to ruin Christmas for a true believer.  Even so, no gifts appeared under the tree before Christmas except those that were received from far away relatives. Knowing about Santa didn’t diminish my anticipation.  There was always something special under the tree on that fantastic morning.

From about second grade on, I asked every year for a Chemistry Set. But Mom was afraid I’d burn down the house so it never arrived.

One year was the electric train – a great Lionel train set. I loved it and Dad let me think it was mine.  It DID have my name on the gift tag.

There were building blocks and an erector set.

There was a record player with an album with the story of Johnny Appleseed narrated and sung by Dennis Day.  I sobbed at the end when Johnny went to his heavenly reward.

There were Nancy Ann Storybook dolls. One year there was a beautiful Alice in Wonderland doll complete with a gorgeous coat with a Persian Lamb collar made by Mom who was an accomplished seamstress.

There was a 26 inch blue and cream Schwinn bike for a 7 year old girl.  I’d grow into it.  It had a headlight and a battery powered horn.  But no training wheels.  Dad taught me to ride.

Dad was a machinist at an International Harvester tractor factory. My folks counted every penny.  They spent a lot of those precious pennies on me at Christmas. 

I was a very lucky little girl.

Tedious but Necessary

My biggest weakness when it comes to genealogy is that I tend to be a “big picture” person.  That’s my rationale for my impatience with the grunt work of dealing with the details.  I want answers NOW.

But the details are crucial and need to be recorded properly – or as well as I can. That last stipulation is because I find some of the handwritten records to be undecipherable.  So I record what I can. 

It helps when there are multiple sources. Here’s a section of the 1832 record of the marriage of Marcin Dachtera and Marianna?????????.  I couldn’t find another example of the first letter of Marianna’s last name so I had no clue at all.

But going to the PoznanProject allowed me to find that marriage record had been transcribed in Poland.  Here’s the search result.

 Exact matches

+ Add comment 
Original record

Catholic parish Parkowo, entry 1 / 1832

·                                 Martinus Dachtera (26 years old)  100%

·                                 Marianna Frąckowiakowna (26 years old) 

I could never have figured out Marianna's last name from the church record.  While I know that transcribers sometimes make mistakes, I'm sure that this is at least very close to correct.

My new plan is to allot a certain amount of time each day to reviewing the details; then go on to something else. I’m hopeful that will contain my impatience and help me make steady progress.  Gotta have a plan.

Tangled Trees

It’s been a while since my last post because I’m not inspired to blog when frustrated.  My double focus lately is trying to make sense of two families.  I alternate from one to the other when I get stuck or overwhelmed. 

 The Polish Genealogy group on Facebook has helped me better understand my dilemma with the Dachtera family.  Church sacramental records from the late 1600s through the 19^th century confused me with several variations of the name.

There was what I was looking for:  Dachtera.  But there were a number of others

Dachterzak

Dachterski

Dachterzakow

Dachterow

The Polish language is very complex.  I didn’t know whether these were likely to be different families or just variant spellings.

The responses to my Facebook query answered some questions but raised a few more. 

I now expect that these are all the same family.

The church records were handwritten in old fashioned European script in either Latin or in Polish.  Penmanship varies widely – some are extremely sloppy while others are picture perfect. The small sample below is more readable than most,

 And the names recorded were apparently at the discretion of the priest who wrote them. He wrote what he heard, or what he thought he heard or what he thought it should be.  (This happened in the US into the 1930’s when the priest at St. Adalbert’s in St. Paul decided that my Schipp relatives should be spelled Szyp.)

So now I have to figure whether out whether “Marcin” is correct, or should be “Martin”.  If Marcin’s wife is shown as Maria in one record and as Marianna in another, are they the same woman? Both were extremely common – a couple may have named one daughter Maria, and another Marianna.

 Trying to follow the Rose family from Maine to New York state to Wisconsin has proven a real challenge.  In New York they lived in counties that were absorbed into other counties.  Without the ability to travel to the courthouses to review the records, I’m dependent on online records and the materials at my library. They have a huge collection of material from New York that I’m sifting through. 

Fortunately, Chicago’s Newberry Library has a wonderful online resource in their Atlas of HistoricalCounty Boundaries.  Its interactive map shows  boundaries for any given year in any given county in the US.

Of course, it is always possible that I’m trying to connect two different Rose families.  Its slow, but I am making some progress.

Happy Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the US.  Families and friends gather to enjoy a feast and to give thanks for all that we have.  I have so very much to be thankful for.

I am most thankful that my great grandparents immigrated to the US.  They left everything that was familiar with the hope of a better life in a new country.  Because of the risks they took, I’ve had the privilege to live in freedom my entire life.

How lucky I am!!

A Rose is a Rose is a Rose…………….???

But I’m beginning to wonder if all the Roses I’ve found are of the same family.  I’m up to my neck in Roses and trying to make sense of it all.

The Roses got from Maine, to New York state, to Wisconsin.  But how? Why?  Based on census and land records, I have some idea of when they moved west and then west again. 

I am truly grateful for online resources such as the Atlas of Historical CountyBoundaries at Chicago’s Newberry library. They have an interactive map that shows how county boundaries changed over time. New counties were formed from old ones; and larger counties swallowed up smaller ones. 

I’m also grateful for historians who so carefully logged people and events and published their findings, especially before states began official recordings of vital statistics.

No doubt it will all come together eventually, but I’m in overload just now.

Heading back to the library.

A Fork in the Road: Bohemia or Maine?

I’ve opted for Maine for now – at least until I hit the brick wall that’s bound to be there.

My focus had been on Poland for my ancestors and on Bohemia for my children’s paternal ancestors.  Bohemia is a tough nut to crack if you have no idea where to look for ancestral villages.  I’d done some research on their paternal grandmother’s ancestors in Maine (as noted in my blog post of Jan 13, 2013), but put that aside to concentrate on the more difficult Bohemia connection. I figured the Maine part would be easier so I’d save that as a reward for my first Bohemia success.  It’s a long wait.  Who knows if I’ll ever get anywhere there.

Then I mentioned to my son that one of his ancestors from Maine had fought in the Revolutionary War.  That really sparked his interest which, in turn, has motivated me to give the Bohemia quest a rest for a while and dig into the Maine folks.

Like most, the typical response I get from family when I talk about genealogy is: “That’s nice”.  So  his interest is a BIG deal.

I’m fortunate that the Indian River County Library has an outstanding genealogy department.  Because of our seasonal snowbird population, we seem to have much more interest in the northeastern part of the US than in Florida.  (Like California, most folks here are from someplace else. It’s always surprising to find a native Floridian who is older than 30.)  The collection about Maine is huge including vital records for every county and many cities.  And I’m looking at online resources I hadn’t used before now.

It’s always fun to start off on a new tangent. Finding new information is great fun. Even finding earlier mistakes is fun because it means progress.  And there are new problems to solve.  In my earlier post I asked: Just how many Solomon Rose’s can there be?  At least four in Maine.

It turns out that Solomon Jr. is really the third.  The fourth Solomon broke the chain but started a new one when his son John set in motion a string of Johns who begat more Johns.  Got to try to keep them straight.  Who’s on first?

In the meantime, I’m rereading microfilms from Polish churches in order to make digital copies that I can make somewhat readable so that I can work at making connections.  Keeps me off the street.

Connecting the Unconnected - I hope

How can I find the connections among numerous people with the same surname who lived in the same area at the same time? Complicating things is the fact that some of them also share common first names.

How can I find the connection between families that I KNOW are related but I don’t have evidence of the connection?

I’m hoping that Clooz software can help me make those connections.

Most genealogy software is lineage based. You enter the people you know are related and use documents to supply evidence of the relationships. Clooz is document based.  You enter documents and the people in those documents. You can then analyze the collection of documents for possible kinships among those people.

My evidence from Polish ancestors comes from Roman Catholic church records that have been microfilmed by the Mormon church.  These records can give clues to relationships that are not obvious.  A Baptismal record is hard evidence of parentage, but it also lists the infant’s godparents.  Who are these people?  They are clearly important people in the lives of the baby’s parents.  Are they siblings?  Cousins?  In-laws?  Neighbors?  The same holds for the witnesses shown in marriage records. They are undoubtedly close to the bride and groom – but how? I want to find the connections.

Problem is that it’s almost like starting from scratch because I must manually enter the documents. And I find the Clooz documentation to be only minimally helpful. The good news is that there are only a few families for which I need to do that.

I still don’t know for absolutely certain where my grandfather, Stanley Dachtera was born.  When I began my research I found many people with the Dachtera surname in a relatively small geographic area. There were also a lot with variations on that name.  How are they all connected?  ARE they connected?

Back fifteen years ago I was able to print the pages from the microfilms but had to take them as they were – no enhancement was possible. Many of them are almost impossible to read.  They’re smudged, or faded or very dark.  And, of course they’re written in Polish or Latin in ancient handwriting.

So I’m going back to those microfilms again.  This time with technology that lets me make electronic copies and even try to clear up and enhance the images before I copy them. Then I can use Photoshop to clean them up even more.

It is a bit daunting. Rereading the films. Learning new software. Entering the data.  I sure hope it solves some mysteries.

I’m a Producer!

I’m a producer – and a legend in my own mind.

I finally finished my first attempt at my first family history video.  It was a challenge. The subject is one set of my great grandparents while they lived in Poland.

Challenge:

Visual content.  There are no photographs of them from that time and, of course, no moving pictures.  I chose images of them that I’d cropped from a later family portrait.  They’re fuzzy, but they’re all I have.  I captured Google Earth images of their home towns  I used photos of the ships on which they arrived in the US.

Challenge:

Script.  I never knew these ancestors so my knowledge comes from oral family history and from documents found during my research.  I also wanted to include a bit of history to put their lives in Poland in context. I ended up modifying the script as I recorded it.

Challenge:

Video software. I’d heard of free software called Movie Maker from Microsoft.  My expectation was that it would be very basic and pretty user friendly. Not for this user.  The download includes no documentation and I could find no “help” button. It was extremely frustrating.

So I dug out my 10 year old Adobe Premier Elements hoping that it would run on Windows 7. It does. It is very user friendly, and it has excellent help and tutorials.

Challenge:

Timing.  I’d learned that 6 minutes is a good upper limit for time.  It turned out that I had so little visual content that it came in at 3 minutes.

Challenge:

Audio software.  Here I was very lucky.  I found free software called Audacity.  It is very highly rated and although it has features needed by professionals, it is extremely easy to use for those of us who know nothing about the intricacies of sound recording.  It comes with excellent documentation.

Challenge:

Recording:  Do I speak clearly enough?  How’s my voice modulation and pacing?  Etc. etc. etc.  I recorded in segments and for reasons I don't yet understand,  the sound level is not equal across them all.  I'll have to learn more about using the software to ensure uniform sound levels.

In the end, I actually came up with a 3 minute video that I’m willing to show to a few other people, but not the whole world.  I’ll show it to those who, I believe, will give it a fair evaluation so that I can make improvements.

I’ll definitely do more like this.  I’m a producer!!

Video Project Progress

What an education this has been.  I backed off of my original concept and instead am working on a short video about one set of my great grandparents.  I'd originally thought that it would be easiest to use as subjects, the family I know least about.  Couldn't get past square 1.5.

Movie Maker is free from Microsoft.  It is relatively new and I thought that MS would provide very user friendly basic video software.  Wrong. Not for me. I struggled trying to figure it out and finally gave up.  Instead I reloaded my 10 year old Adobe Premier Elements. It was written for Windows XP so I kept my fingers crossed that it would work on Windows 7. It does.  I don't even know if Adobe makes an "Elements" version of Premier anymore.

I also learned just how important it is to do a storyboard - something I'd had no experience with. Some internet research helped a lot and I found a free storyboard template that uses MS Word.

This is a Ken Burns kind of project. I have no actual video footage,  It will be a series of graphics and still pictures with my narration.

This project will cover only the time from 1850 when my great grandfather was born, to 1887 when the family emigrated from Poland to the United States. And I really know nothing about their lives in Poland.  It should be less than 5 minutes long.

It has taken much longer than I expected to select the visuals.  If time wasn't an issue, it might have been easier to just include everything I've found, but I don't like videos longer than 5 minutes so that's my limit..

Script writing has also been a challenge.  How to I tell a reasonable short story?  What is important information and what isn't.  Can I make it interesting? Probably not.

Next step is to record the narration. That scares me.  How is my voice quality?  Can I speak clearly enough and naturally enough?

When I finish, will I have the guts to let anyone else  see it?

Time will tell.

Welcome to the 21st Century

There’s a new genealogy website that seems to be causing much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth in the genealogy community – especially, it seems, among traditional genealogists who’ve been doing this long before online genealogy exploded into what it is today.

The new site is FamilyTreeNow.com and the controversy is over its inclusion of Living People.  Privacy concerns have always limited publicly available family history and family trees to include only the deceased. This makes perfect sense – especially since the breadth of our tree may include individuals that we don’t know and who may not even know that we exist.   Mine does.  Birth records are available online, as are marriage and divorce records. It is easy to find the name of a distant cousin’s spouse. But those records are from the past and are usually restricted to exclude the most current data.

Now comes FamilyTreeNow that not only has the usual collection of census, birth, marriage, death, etc. records but also searches for living people.  Horrors!!!

But the fact is that there have always been online people locators.  If you enter a name into Google search, your results are very likely to include one or more search services that will give you address information, phone number and even more. Some are free of charge but some have a fee and include more information.  FamilyTreeNow apparently has simply aggregated these people finders.

Why are people shocked??

Even though genealogists do painstaking searches of old public records, some people are upset to see the trail they, themselves, have left.  Many times we don’t realize just how visible is our trip through life – especially these days.  We pore through old city directories looking for relatives without thinking of just how many public phone directories, church and school directories have registered our whereabouts over the years; and just how many traces we’ve left behind in public documents.

Unless you’ve lived completely off the grid for a few years, any sufficiently motivated person can find you and members of your family.  I’ve read that even the Witness Protection Program has holes.  If you do a web search for a recipe and then go to the site, you may find that in addition to the recipe a sidebar will have ads for grocery stores near you.  They know where you live.  It’s life in the 21^st century.

This is more complex than I thought

I’ve started on the YouTube project I mentioned in a previous post. Lured by the ease of use of Microsoft Movie Maker, I dived right in.  Problem is that planning the video is the hard part.  My first effort will be for my eyes only – just an experiment, but that doesn’t mean that it’s simple.

First, decide which line to start with.  I picked the one for which I have the least information because I thought that would make for easier decisions on content – not too much to choose from.  I’m rethinking that decision.

Starting with a mind map using XMind (free software), I laid out the kind of content to include.  Very simple for my first project.

I have no old photos because this is not my family – its my children’s paternal heritage.  So I went off looking for old photos of Prague. Not very many that don’t have full copyright restrictions.  Then I looked for old photos of late 19^th century Chicago which was much easier.  I’ll use images of census documents to show the families.

The next step would be a script, or so I thought.  Actually the next step is a storyboard.  I just use an outline for planning the flow of the video.  It’s not complex enough to need a true storyboard.

Then I started a script.  This is not as simple as just writing.  I tend to be pretty wordy, and I have a time constraint so scripting is a challenge.  I wonder how many versions will be created before I get one that will work.  I’m using Marlis Humphrey’s guidelines for a video which means it should run no longer than 6 minutes.  Mine will be much shorter than that partly because I’m having trouble coming up with the right narration content; and partly because I don’t like watching videos that are more than 3 or 4 minutes long.

Getting my mind around this has been a challenge.

So I’m thinking of shelving this project and doing my first attempt using one of my own lines.  Maybe it will be more comfortable working with the ancestors I know the most about.  Will having more material make it more difficult?  Hope not.

So I’m off to start another mind map.

Genealogy??? Family History???

Are Genealogy and Family History the same thing?  Mostly but not always.

Tony Proctor addressed this in a recent blog post titled The Lineage Trap on his Parallax View blog.  He points out that for most people family history is as important as mere lineage. 

 There are dozens of brands of genealogy software available. After doing a brief survey of what’s out there, it appears that only Family Historian  - developed in the UK - permits non-familial connections between individuals. 

I started searching my roots to try to answer the question: Who am I, and why am I here? That means finding my ancestors as far back as I can. More than that, It means trying to learn just who these people were. Where and how did they live?  What were the current events of their lives?  How did history and culture shape them  - and me and my descendants?

Members of the LDS church have specific goals in tracing their lineage. There are probably still a few folks who trace their families in hopes of finding royalty or at least someone famous. Most of us, I believe, are really looking for more than a chart showing who begat whom. We want to know the stories of our families.

These stories include more than bloodlines. The people who were the official witnesses of baptisms and marriages and other legal documents were important in our ancestors’ lives. How do we record these connections?  In my own database there are several families with the same surname who are little islands because I haven’t found a direct connection to my family, but have found indirect connections.  In a few cases, my research has discovered connections between previously unconnected families.

Clooz is a different kind of genealogy software.  It is document based rather than people based and looks like it could do the things I want to do.  Problem is that I use Family Tree Maker and Clooz cannot import from that because Anecstry.com (owner of Family Tree Maker)  will not make available the specs that would allow Clooz’ developers to create import capability.

So I’m in a quandary. Switch to other software?  Which other software? I like the ability to synchronize my FTM and Ancestry.com databases. Run two local programs and maintain changes in them both? 

I’ll be grateful for comments and suggestions from anyone who has solved this dilemma.

Going off on a tangent

I am starting a publishing project – that is “modern” publishing - and taking a break from serious researching.

Marlis Humphrey  www.myAncestories.com was the speaker at the September meeting of Indian River Genealogy Society. Marlis is nationally recognized as an expert on publishing family histories. She presented at the most recent RootsTech and has been invited to present again at the next one.

Marlis defines publishing in a broad context with the emphasis on getting the target audience to pay attention and actually enjoy the content.  This means that books are pretty much at the bottom of her list of how to communicate our research results to our families, including the youngest members of the family.

Like many family historians, I’ve embarked on a few very wordy narrations of what I’ve discovered.  Even if I added photos, it would be rather dull reading for most people.

Marlis’ presentation was on using electronic media to tell our family stories. Our grandchildren, nieces and nephews are more attuned to the visual.

Probably the most straight forward of these would be a PowerPoint presentation with voice-over audio added. 

The most complex would be an electronic magazine using software such as Issuu or Flipboard.

I’m going to try creating a movie for YouTube. That doesn’t necessarily mean using a video camera to produce content.  Marlis asks us to think of the wonderful work of Ken Burns.  Some of his documentaries easily contain more still photos than actual video footage.  What a concept!  She showed us a few examples of what others have done with this idea.

Movie Maker is free software from Microsoft.  It looks very easy to use so that’s my choice, not to mention the “free”part.

It’s going to be a challenge, but it should be fun.

A few of the many FREE Online Resources

Dear Myrtle  http://blog.dearmyrtle.com/ 

Today I listened/watched Mondays with Myrt and I don’t know why I’ve waited so long to finally plug in.  I followed her blog when I first began my research and then, for some reason, I didn’t. She’s one of the key resources for genealogists. Every Monday she hosts a Google+ hangout that begins at noon Eastern time. There’s always a panel of genealogists online with her; and viewers can ask questions and make comments.

Today one of the topics was Transcript – a free software program designed to help create transcripts of documents. It permits manipulation of a document image to help read and transcribe it  Find it at http://www.jacobboerema.nl/en/Freeware.htm

Haven’t we all encountered documents that were very difficult to read.

Myrt also has a youTube channel. There’s a link on her website.

GeneaWebinars   http://blog.geneawebinars.com/ 

“News about upcoming hangouts, meetings and webinars offered throughout the online genealogy community.”

The calendar provides date, time, URL, a description of the topic, and information and links to register for events.

Family Search   http://familysearch.org 

The holy grail of online research.  I know you’re aware if it, but you may not know just how broad it is.  There’s an extensive WIKI that goes far beyond the site. One example is a Wiki entry about  Geneteka a Polish Genealogical database.

Google+ 

One of the features of Google+ is the ability to create “communities” that are composed of people of like interest.  The genealogy community is huge and worth joining. 

This Genealogy Stuff is Driving Me Crazy!

First, my apologies to Melvin J Collier http://rootsrevealed.blogspot.com/ for stealing his post title.  But it is the perfect expression of my feeling right now.

I have a few brick walls I’m tilting at but I’m used to hitting them.  My real frustration is with the mazes I’m in. Two of them.

The Rose family in the 1700’s and early 1800’s in New England has me running around in circles. Just how many Solomon Roses can there be?  Too many!  Other researchers have found several documents naming Solomon Rose, but it isn’t clear on some of them whether they pertain to Solomon Sr. or Solomon Jr.  And what about the Solomons in other locations?  Are they named for a common ancestor?  Or was Solomon a trendy name in those days?

The other maze involves the Perry familie(s) in Tennessee in the mid 1800’s. There are just too darn many William Perrys!  And too many others with matching or similar names / middle names: Claybourn, Claborn, Clayburn, Clabron. Are they all connected? Or are they named after some local hero?  Were they really all spelled differently, or were they recorded wrong?

I’ve just installed some mind-mapping software.  Maybe it will help me begin to apply some logic to getting out of the mazes.

In the meantime, I think I’ll go read a book for a while.

Needing a Kickstart

Do you ever need external stimulation to keep your projects going?

I sure do.

After several months of being away from my genealogy projects I’ve had a difficult time getting refocused.  Some time ago a cousin asked for information about her grandfather; and that got me going for a while.  Recently another query from someone researching a similar line got me into a temporary flurry of activity.

Now I’ve rediscovered the FamilyTreeWebinars and the juices are beginning to flow again.  Finally. 

Webinars about researching in Illinois and in Tennessee motivated me to get back in the hunt for one of my husband’s lines; and also for some of my distant cousins.

My genealogy society does not meet during the summer so I’m really looking forward to September and the first meeting of the season.  They always give me the kick in the butt that I seem to need.

If anyone reading this has some tips on self motivation, I’d be grateful if you’d post a comment.

Polish Haitians

I was surprised to learn about Polish Haitians.  The topic came up at the last meeting of the Polish interest group of the Indian River Genealogical Society. The story of Poles in Haiti is a complex combination of fact and the myths that have grown around the facts. 

In the late 18^th century, Haiti provided most of the coffee and sugar enjoyed in Napoleon’s Europe –supplied by slave labor.  The final years of the 1790’s saw a slave uprising and the eventual independence of the island with its own Constitution.  But Napoleon was determined to return the island to its previous circumstance as a subject of France.  To this end, he sent 40,000 troops to Haiti; 4,000 of which were Polish soldiers.  

Zena’s 2011 Black History Month blog includes a very clear and concise description of the struggle and the eventual destiny of many of the Poles who originally arrived to fight for France.

 Polish Haitians - How they came to be

My own research doesn’t go back that far yet; but I suppose that it is possible that I have very distant cousins in Haiti.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now..... Where was I??

Genealogy got put aside when I was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer. At first my energies were focused on learning about my disease and its treatment.  By the time I had a handle on that,  the combination of extreme fatigue and the mental fuzziness of “Chemo Brain” left me pretty much unable to concentrate or focus for more than a couple of milliseconds. No way I could do any research.  So I spent the past several months reading light fluffy mysteries and playing easy computer games. 

Chemo is done!!  I’m still fatigued and still pretty fuzzy, but I’m coming back to being me.  Fortunately, I got a jump start from a query from a cousin. Good timing. She was asking about the family I’d been working on when it got set aside. 

All I have to do now is find all the information and the files and carry on from where I left off.  HAH! Easier said than done.   

I know I created the files because I printed them. So where are they?  Not on my local disk.  Not on a jump drive. Oh, they’re on my external disk.  Phew!!!  A step in the right direction.   

Where are my hand written notes?  I made notes, right?  RIGHT????  I sure hope so. 

How much updating of my tree did I do?  Was I able connect family members that I’d just recently found?

Etc., Etc., Etc……. 

I’ll eventually get it together.  It feels good to be back at it.

 

Coming back soon, I hope

I suspect that anyone who followed this blog has long given up on it.  It's been a long dry spell with no posts.

I've been coping with cancer for the past several months, dealing with "chemo brain".  One of the side effects of chemo therapy is a fuzzy brain - inability to concentrate and focus on anything for very long.  Genealogy requires the kind of thinking and focus that has been beyond me for a while. Even reading is not easy.  I've temporarily given up on the complex mysteries that I love, and have been making do with what I call "fluffy" books.  Easy reads.  No real thinking.

But there's finally light at the end of the tunnel.  I'll be done with chemo at the end of February; and I'm hopeful that my mental faculties with return to normal before long.  There's still 6 weeks of radiation to get through, but the end is in sight.

On Saturday I attended an all day seminar by John Colleta.  He's a great speaker who has re-ignited the flame that was just an ember for so many months.

I'm hopeful that you'll hear from me again soon.