Genealogy
June 16, 2020
Oh my goodness. I keep meaning to post and I keep writing blog articles in my head and somehow a year has passed since I’ve written anything. As they say, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions!” I hope not, for my own sake. While social distancing, I have been continuing my project of re-scanning all my family photos, putting them into archival pages in an album and organizing the digital files with meta-tags so that everyone will be identified and put in the right family folders. I may have mentioned that I actually scanned all my family photos back in 2008. But at that time, I did the project for my parents and the goal was to just get them digitized. Now that my parents are gone, I’ve been able to go through the images, throw out the ones of stuff that have no import to the […]
May 1, 2019
Around 10 years ago, I scanned all of my parents’ photographs for them. It was a huge project which I did at my dad’s request. My company Legacy Multimedia was beginning to do some archival projects and I wanted to do this for my parents but also as a way of experimenting with different scanning and archiving techniques as I worked out a process for clients. And I did it all wrong. I’m not going to go into the list of mistakes that I made but there were many. Over time, I organized and re-organized the structure of the archive and at one point, had one of my employees work on it for a few weeks; sorting out duplicates, and breaking up some photos that were in large page scans. What I meant to do was to sit down and finally get everything sorted out correctly, re-scan the badly scanned […]
October 10, 2018
When I first started doing DNA testing and connecting the dots of my new cousins I had visions of the kind of family reunions you read about in Women’s Day. 100 people with matching family T-shirts grilling hot dogs and eating watermelon in a big park somewhere. Bulletin boards cluttered with family photos and three-legged sack races. Well, it didn’t take long to peel the rose-colored layer off my glasses. Not everyone was happy to hear from me. Many people with strong DNA matches never responded to my inquiries. I guess it’s a “thing” to get your DNA tested and see what percentage of you is Irish, never mind actually following up on who you might be related to. After sending an email to a second cousin who it took me months to locate, his wife told him that my email was spam and that I was probably looking for […]
September 30, 2018
As I mentioned on the home page of this website, I have been working on my family’s genealogy for at least 10 years now, but I didn’t get really serious about it until this past year. I’m not sure I can point to this as the reason, but I think the loss of both my parents played a large part in my turn toward the tree. After caring for them for so many years, I felt unmoored with their departures. My sense of family felt disconnected. We were a small family. My father was an only child, and my mother had one brother who died several years before her, leaving only one son. I made an effort to better know the cousins that I already had relationships with, and I started looking at that research again. The DNA tests I did on my parents were yielding emails from people wanting […]