Race Against The Clock

Do you ever feel as though you're racing against the clock's spinning hands? I sure do. Every day. I don't know where this feeling comes from as I really have ample time to devote to the pursuit of genealogy, or more precisely, a reasonably amount of time that should be spent by any human sitting in a chair, staring at the monitor's glowing magic, in a motionless trance!

See, there are all these dead people waiting to be found. And while they are obviously not going anywhere, I could at any time, fall off the edge of the world. Ya never know, right? So there are projects I really want to do and answers to be had, well, at least theoretically. I prioritize and make lists-a-plenty, moving forward in a somewhat orderly fashion. All is well and then the Race Against Time Monster rises behind my chair!

This monster tells me I'm not doing it fast enough nor hard enough, not looking in the right places. I am after all, a relative newbie (no pun intended.) I know that I must be wasting time on uneducated guesses, or malformed search pursuits. That's just part of the learning process. So what's with the Monster?

After pondering this a bit I think it's has to do with my concern that I'm not immortal. (Big revelation there.) And that I want all of Mom's good work and Aunt Betty's good work to be in some form or format that will insure that it gets transmitted down the generations. I think that when all is said and done, my mission if I am able to do it, is to get this stuff organized and put together for the future. Not that Mom and Aunt Betty haven't done that, and very well!

I look at the work done by those no longer with us, that has helped me the most, and I'm so impressed by the cogent way they pull it all together. Doesn't your heart race whenever you find a book or text about a particular family line?! Mine sure does.

I don't know what exactly I envision but it has to capture the imagination of younger people of each generation. Pictures, stories, charts so they can easily see who came from who. Sure, sources. You have to have sources.

So I'm thinking, as I sit in front of the monitor, about how it might be possible to bring together whatever exists now that falls under the umbrella of "family history". This is gonna take a while! But at least now I better know what I'm racing toward in this race against the clock.

Photo of the day from the Archive:

Me, 1951.

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