In Praise of Genealogists
Having spent the last several days working on my family genealogy, I really have to
hand it to those who have come before me.
The pitfalls to doing it correctly are legion. The persistence and focus it takes are incredible.
There are times when you run into what seems a dead end, causing you to spend hours on wild goose chases. There are other times when you have an overload of information and get off track of your original goal. It’s like looking for something on google and finding something that leads you further and further from where you wanted to go until you can’t even remember what your goal was in the first place.
Most software for doing genealogy is actually very good. Perhaps too good in many cases. They provide so many places to put references, notes, websites, sources etc. that you soon tire of it and decide to do it later. Later seems to never come, or if it does come, you can’t remember what you were going to do anyway.
The family (not the family you ask for information but the family you are trying to make a record of) is not helpful at all. Armbrusters become Armbristers who become Armbrists and Armbrusts. They marry more than once. They widow and then marry brothers of their former husbands. They have children from both brothers. It can be quite a mess. Ben Sr., Ben Jr., and Ben III are fine. But Ben has a family tree and 50 years later someone barely related names their kid Ben also. *sigh*
The work I am doing is to move information from a book to a genealogy program which saves the work in the standard .ged format and makes html files as well. It should be quite easy to move stuff from a book but I find it often very frustrating. I am trying to update the information from it from any web sources I can find. The formats are quite different in most cases. Each time I find information on the web, the first order of business is to find out if 3-4-07 is March 4 2007 or March 4 1907 or April 3 1907 etc.
I have in front of me a book that just amazes me. It is titled “Family Directory of Samuel Swartz Histand and Susan Overhold Landis” (dependants and Ascendants). Compiled bye Ruth Histand Mosemann. The part that amazes me is that it was published in the year 1969.
In 1969 there were no computers available for genealogy. No internet. WWW.SQUAT. All this information was collected on file cards and somehow kept organized without the use of any database software whatsoever. Ruth, I bow to your talents and effort. I thank you for making this available to the rest of us so we can try to carry on.
I am lucky that my family has more than a few amateur genealogists so if I should fail at my attempts there will still be a record of our family history. Hopefully I can do some small part to help them out.