Tuesday, May 12, 2015

J T Weaver | And in the end the love you take, is equal to the love you make. — The Beatles

Here's a good example of a lifestory blog, of stories that a father tells for his children -- the kind of stories that he wishes his parents had left for him about their lives J T Weaver | And in the end the love you take, is equal to the love you make. — The Beatles:
My Dearest Sarah and Patrick,
Before you is a set of stories about your father. When you wake up one morning and notice that you are not the towhead kid that you once were, you get a first hand look at your own mortality. It has long been my intention to leave you both with some tangible evidence of your family heritage. Yes, we have the ancestry tree that has been passed from one generation to another. That tells JTus the who and the what of those who lived before us. But it doesn’t tell us anything about the how and the why of those lives.
One of the things we are often told in manuals of genealogy is that in addition to recording what we can of our ancestors, we should also leave a record of our own lives and times for our children, of the kind that we sometimes wish had been left for us.

One of my own efforts along these lines is Tales from Dystopia, stories about what life was like in the apartheid era in South Africa, which few people under the age of 30 will remember.
 

Saturday, May 02, 2015

Hillary Clinton Family Tree a Wake-Up Call for Genealogy

Hillary Clinton Family Tree a Wake-Up Call for Genealogy | Megan Smolenyak:
When Irish America requested that I research and write a piece on Hillary Rodham Clinton's heritage (pages 50-52), I was concerned. Why? Because delving into the ancestral past of celebrities has become something of a sub-hobby in the world of genealogy, so I knew that countless others would have climbed the branches of her family tree. What would I possibly be able to add that wasn't already known? Fortunately for me, but regrettably for genealogy in general, there was plenty of fresh terrain because I soon realized that everyone had a quarter of her family tree wrong. And when I say "everyone," I mean dozens of people on at least eight family history websites.