Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Wisdom Wednesday: Thank goodness for...

It's that middle day of the week and here we go on a GeneaBlogger's blogging prompt called Wisdom Wednesdays. This week it's all about what I'm thankful for, even though it's not November, which, for those of you not in the USA, is when we celebrate my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. I was talking to Mom the other day and we were marveling at how genealogy has changed as she entertained me with stories of how she did it when she started in the 1970s! How we laughed! I've seen her stacks of 3 by 5 cards, family group sheets, and the rest, all hand written, and they look strange to my eye used to a computer print out.

So here are all the things I'm thankful for most recently, in no particular order. And I have to say that right now I'm in my usual June slump and just would rather sit in a hammock, and let the laundry pile up and up. (But maybe with a laptop and a cool adult beverage.)

The Internet. I shudder to think how slow my progress both in learning about genealogy, meeting up with cousins and fellow researchers, as well as digging as deep as I can into those records, would be if there was no internet and web service! Ugh!

Google Satellite View. I sit here in sunny Southern California emailing Cousin Andrew who lives back east about our shared ancestors who were Welsh. And we're talking about the Barque Tiberius on which our Thomas ancestors sailed out of Newport Harbor, Wales, on 30 June, 1838, and that's 175 years ago this week!!
Wait, I thought to myself, where is Newport Harbor? And I'm especially curious because we don't know where these Thomas folks lived when they were recruited to be coal miners in the George's Creek mines in Western Maryland by the Consolidation Coal Company. Wow, I think, looking at the satellite view, we drove right by there on the M4 when we went to Wales that time in the 1980s! Love you, Google Satellite View!

Latest Guilty Pleasure: Shades of the Departed! A cuppa and a cookie and I sit down to thumb through Shades, the most fabulous on-line magazine this gal has ever seen!  Shades carries the imagination back into the past and over hills and valleys to towns and farm lands to meet ancestors we never knew or people of the past not even connected to us. I feel as though I'm sitting in a late 1800s train station and people arrive and sit and chat and reveal themselves to me, and I can gaze as long as I like without being rude. This is absolutely my new "guilty pleasure" and I use that term because I probably should be doing something else like laundry, but don't really care one fig.

Blog posts that come along at the right time. Here's an example. Research and connecting the dots on the ancestors is especially difficult for me in West Virginia and if you have the magic potion to help me find them, then please have mercy on a stumbling fool and let me know! I always feel like many of the dead-end brick wall situations on the tree lead over to West Virginia... or Ireland and Wales. I can understand the last two because it's a Pond hop. But WV, even though it's just "over the hill a bit" is all messed up! I just love The Legal Genealogist blog by Judy G. Russell. I've learned so much from her. Then she did a blog post about the forming of West Virginia and a light went off: it's not so much me as it is them! Whew. WV, you are difficult. (Go WVU Mountaineers!)

The Encouragers! I do like those in the land of genealogy who encourage and help. Look, we're all trying to learn. So here's to the encouragers, and most are, who daily take up blogging to share and maybe help others, as well as those many helpful and dear souls who come to the local groups to help and find help. Hugs to all!! What a nice community we are!

Thank goodness for so much stuff to be grateful about! (Am feeling so good I might even do some laundry, but later.)


 
Eckhart Cemetery, Eckhart, Allegany, Maryland.
 
 

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