This lovely post about writing family history in a way that is engaging even for non-genealogists got me thinking about an experience I had a few years ago.
I think a lot of us have had those same ah ha moments, I know I have. Thanks for articulating them so beautifully. I think family history and genealogy both deserve good selling telling while also benefitting from all the research we can gather. As creatives, I think we need all that stuff rolling around in our heads in order to be good storytellers - which you most definitely are!
This is one of the reasons I am hesitating to start the process to get certified as a genealogist. It seems there are a lot of practitioners out there who you describe. While I understand the need for proof standards and correct citation, I sometimes see a lot of rigor around evidence for the sake of evidence… with nothing further to say about it. What’s the point if not to get to know these names as people?
Respect the value of documenting, while at the same time I recognize just because it's written down somewhere doesn't make it truth. Perhaps you, too, have had the experience of finding errors in respected genealogical databases? I have, and corrections were made. No harm, no foul, just the way things roll. Grateful that there are those whose minds work to make such documents -- but my mind craves stories of "what was it like?" Love a good historical fiction, for example. Among my writing pals we have a saying "It may not be factual, but it's true." So glad to know about your blogs, Savannah and Ancestory.
Same! I love the idea of getting certified, I want to learn all the stuff that goes into it, and I actually enjoy taking classes and that sort of thing, generally. But I don’t want to do it if it’s going to feel like that, it might ruin the hobby for me haha
Thanks for sharing your story about WHY you transitioned from data collecting to storytelling. Your experience is note-worthy and so, so telling. I get bored with the who begat who of my own family! But telling an interesting -- and authentic -- story is where the challenge really lies!
Amen sister, preach it. I’ve always been in the story camp (and I love having the collected data handy to aid in the story creation.) So good of your grandma to sit through that with you :)
And interesting to see the software group talking here above me. I manage a group of software devs, although my skills are out of date and rusty and I spent my last years as an analyst before transitioning to management. My job now is often to translate tech talk to something others can understand. But I always thought genealogy and software/tech seemed to go together well.
So cool to see another software engineer getting into genealogy :) Feels like there's so much we could do to benefit the community. Please write a post or two if you've written any tools/apps to aid yourself with your research or publication!
I'm continually surprised how many of us seem to be into genealogy! 😂 I haven't made any software for it myself besides awhile back I wrote a little script to scrape ancestry matches automatically and save them in my own database because I wanted to be able to see matches in common with people I don't match myself but who have shared their results with me, haha. I think it's currently broken since their update and also that it's probably against their TOS so never did share that. 😂 Always interested in joining projects though if people are making cool open source stuff, I can never decide what I want to do myself haha
Absolutely! It's kin to the way my own eyes glazed over in US history class where this, that and the other war and military leader were required knowledge. I was far more enthralled to hear later in life that the "shot heard round the world" that purportedly started the American revolution started as a bar fight. Our brains crave stories.
I have been in many meetings like the one you attended. You have written about the feeling of loving the subject but feeling bored, in a lovely way. It's my opinion that societies and groups will need to change the way they do things in the future if they want the younger generation to stay interested, or even be interested enough to attend one of their meetings. We definitely need to do the research to be able to tell the stories. However, it's the stories that are the most interesting.
I always feel like I'm struggling to bring the story-teller and the fact-finder together; you need both, obviously, but you can't let them beat each other up!
I think a lot of us have had those same ah ha moments, I know I have. Thanks for articulating them so beautifully. I think family history and genealogy both deserve good selling telling while also benefitting from all the research we can gather. As creatives, I think we need all that stuff rolling around in our heads in order to be good storytellers - which you most definitely are!
This is one of the reasons I am hesitating to start the process to get certified as a genealogist. It seems there are a lot of practitioners out there who you describe. While I understand the need for proof standards and correct citation, I sometimes see a lot of rigor around evidence for the sake of evidence… with nothing further to say about it. What’s the point if not to get to know these names as people?
Respect the value of documenting, while at the same time I recognize just because it's written down somewhere doesn't make it truth. Perhaps you, too, have had the experience of finding errors in respected genealogical databases? I have, and corrections were made. No harm, no foul, just the way things roll. Grateful that there are those whose minds work to make such documents -- but my mind craves stories of "what was it like?" Love a good historical fiction, for example. Among my writing pals we have a saying "It may not be factual, but it's true." So glad to know about your blogs, Savannah and Ancestory.
Same! I love the idea of getting certified, I want to learn all the stuff that goes into it, and I actually enjoy taking classes and that sort of thing, generally. But I don’t want to do it if it’s going to feel like that, it might ruin the hobby for me haha
Thanks for sharing your story about WHY you transitioned from data collecting to storytelling. Your experience is note-worthy and so, so telling. I get bored with the who begat who of my own family! But telling an interesting -- and authentic -- story is where the challenge really lies!
I love your search skills and writing, but you already know that!
Amen sister, preach it. I’ve always been in the story camp (and I love having the collected data handy to aid in the story creation.) So good of your grandma to sit through that with you :)
And interesting to see the software group talking here above me. I manage a group of software devs, although my skills are out of date and rusty and I spent my last years as an analyst before transitioning to management. My job now is often to translate tech talk to something others can understand. But I always thought genealogy and software/tech seemed to go together well.
So cool to see another software engineer getting into genealogy :) Feels like there's so much we could do to benefit the community. Please write a post or two if you've written any tools/apps to aid yourself with your research or publication!
I'm continually surprised how many of us seem to be into genealogy! 😂 I haven't made any software for it myself besides awhile back I wrote a little script to scrape ancestry matches automatically and save them in my own database because I wanted to be able to see matches in common with people I don't match myself but who have shared their results with me, haha. I think it's currently broken since their update and also that it's probably against their TOS so never did share that. 😂 Always interested in joining projects though if people are making cool open source stuff, I can never decide what I want to do myself haha
Absolutely! It's kin to the way my own eyes glazed over in US history class where this, that and the other war and military leader were required knowledge. I was far more enthralled to hear later in life that the "shot heard round the world" that purportedly started the American revolution started as a bar fight. Our brains crave stories.
And thank you for linking my post. It’s fun to see people I haven’t met get what I’m passionate about.
I was nodding along the whole time reading this. Amen sister, amen.
I have been in many meetings like the one you attended. You have written about the feeling of loving the subject but feeling bored, in a lovely way. It's my opinion that societies and groups will need to change the way they do things in the future if they want the younger generation to stay interested, or even be interested enough to attend one of their meetings. We definitely need to do the research to be able to tell the stories. However, it's the stories that are the most interesting.
I always feel like I'm struggling to bring the story-teller and the fact-finder together; you need both, obviously, but you can't let them beat each other up!