Genealogical musings

I mentioned in the previous post that after many years (decades) of wanting to do so, I finally started dipping my toes into the world of genealogy. And despite my terrible habit of developing an interest in something, then going all-balls at whatever it is, only to lose complete interest some months later and never return to the subject; it's now been a few months, and I'm still very much engaged. I'd say I was currently up to my knees in it.

Seeing as how many people spend a lifetime researching, I am a mere babe when it comes to all things genealogy, and probably will continue to be for many years to come. I'm still in the "completely amazed by everything" stage, and knowing me, I might never get out of it. What can I say, I'm a simple person, who's amazed by simple things.

I'm sure that I'm not the first person that this happened to, but looking into my own family's history has really opened up my eyes and made me start thinking of the bigger picture as far we as individuals, and a society, go. Two examples that come immediately to mind are:

1). Most people think of themselves as just having one last name, if your name is John Smith, then your a Smith, but in actuality, you're probably made up of dozens of last names. This probably isn't that interesting to anyone reading this, but I think it is. Someday, I'd like to compile a list, and see just how many confirmable last names that I'm made up from.

2). People are connected. And not just in a "we're all humans, therefor we're all in this together" sort of way, no, a lot of people are connected familial; and probably don't even realize it. For most people, all you'd have to do is go back three or four generations, and you'll start finding great (x3 or 4) grandparents that had ten or more children. And even though a couple of those children probably died during infancy, there's usually at least half that lived long enough to have children of their own. And if those children then had 7 or 8 kids of their own, then those kids grew up and... well, you get the point. It doesn't take long before your extended family becomes, uh, extended. Very extended! Some of these folks may be a cousin thirty times removed, but they're still family. 

This got me to wondering too about crime. Not in a general sense, but just wondering how often people commit crimes against an unknown relative? This seems like it's got to happen more often than one might think, especially in instances where the families of all parties involved have lived in specific area/region for any length of time. Someone could be robbing a 4th or 5th cousin, and not even know it. Of course too, it then begs the question, if they did know it, would they even care? I mean, people kill their parents, and siblings, all of the time, and obviously they know that there related, so those sorts probably wouldn't think twice about harming a less connected relative, but I do think that some people might think twice about committing an act of crime on another person if they knew that they were related. And I know that some folks say that everyone on Earth is related, but I'm talking about in a way that's actually traceable.

It also now makes me wonder if I've ever interacted with anyone through the blogs that I'm related to? The odds seem like they'd be fairly high, but trying to figure out who, and how, would probably take some doing.

Two additional things that came to mind after getting to this point in the post...

3). I've also been surprised to learn that many families have genealogical books that have been published for their last name. One family that I'm directly connected to, the Sprague's, even have multiple books on their doings (they've been here awhile). I can't remember who it is as I'm typing this, but there's at least one other family on my tree that has a book out too. I'd like to get all of these books at some point, but they seem to be rather cost prohibitive. I haven't found any online yet that were less than $30. That's a bit much for me.

4). I am not pro-communism, nor am I socialist, so please forgive my sounding like either when I say that people should not have to pay to access information about their families. This is not something that I had ever thought of before, but am now convinced that I'm right, and it would take a lot of doing to change my mind. I've done a couple of free trials on the various pay sites over the last month or so, and now that I've seen what they've got to offer, I can honestly say that aside for one of them (more on that in a minute), the people who run these sites should be embarrassed to charge as much as they do; for how little they actually do. Nearest I can tell, most of the pay sites only host the information, all of which is added by users who are paying to do so. Then that information is for all intensive purposes, held hostage. Most of them do offer services of some kind or another, but all of those services are being completed by a third party. And I'm sure that I'm naive when it comes to how much it costs to run a giant website, but even so, I don't think that it takes two million users paying $30 a month to just to store a bunch of information.

My most recent free-trial was for Genealogy Bank, and that's one site that I might consider signing up for (they have a discounted rate offer that's like $7 a month). Despite the name, it's quite a bit more than just genealogy, it's actually more like Newspapers.com, than say an Ancestry. In fact, by modifying your searches, you can actually use it as just a newspaper site, and what's more, they have a shit-ton of different papers than Newspapers.com. Aside from being able to easily find obituaries and census information, the biggest draw of that site for me was that they're the only site that has an agreement with The Oregonian, which was/has been a boon for researching posts for my Portland Beavers blog.

I guess while I'm talking about sites too, I might as well mention Find a Grave. I really like that site. Their biggest draw is that you're able to see where relatives are buried (and not just in the U.S.), which is really neat for those of us that don't travel much. I also like that some users add personal information to their relatives pages, even more so when it's information that was obtained via one of the pay sites. For those unfamiliar with the site, they even have a section where people can request a photo of a loved one's gravesite [that isn't already on the site]. After seeing how many requests were open for cemeteries near me, I decided that I wanted to try and help out, and have volunteered to start fulfilling some of those requests. I haven't done any yet, but I'm hoping to start next week.

One other site that I want to put out there is WikiTree. I just found it a couple of days ago, and have only been able to play around on it for a couple of minutes thus far, but I am really impressed by what I've seen so far. It's a free site, and even though it looks like the site isn't as big as some of the others, they apparently make up for it by double and triple checking the veracity of all information that is uploaded to the site. I've yet to see anyone else do that. They also appear to specialize in more obscure information when possible, so it's hard to imagine anyone complaining about that.

I think that's everything that I left out of the previous post. And now that I got to it, I'll do you all a favor and not mention anything else about genealogy for at least four posts, um, maybe three. 😉

And finally, on a completely unrelated note, a bear got into the garbage can the other night. I didn't see it happen, but a bear is the only thing strong enough to have pulled the lid off the can. That is, unless there's a bear-sized raccoon running around. Thankfully there was only two small bags of garbage in the can at the time, so the aftermath didn't require much effort to pick up. I still haven't seen one, but every Summer I come across at least two piles of bear poo (it's very distinctive) around the house (last year there was even one in the driveway). 

This is supposed to be the year that I finally buy a couple of trail cams, but so far, I'm procrastinating, as always. I have tried to do a little research on them, but not being technologically minded, I get bored awfully quick when I start seeing stuff about gigabytes and megawatts. And there's the pixels and bandwidth. I just can't stay focused on that kind of stuff for more than a couple of a minutes at a time. Which is why I don't have any trail cams yet, which in turn is why I missed the bear treating my garbage can like an oversized pic-a-nic basket.