James Tanner often writes about the Rules of Genealogy. These aren’t rules in the sense that you must follow them. They’re common sense parameters for doing genealogy. Natural laws rather than rules of the game, if you will. Rule One: When the baby was born, the mother was there. Rule Two: Absence of an obituary…
Category: Genealogy
Genealogy Requires Actual Research Skills
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…
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…