After being away last week, I tried to get back into the
swing of things once we arrived home. We’ve had a heat wave, eerily red suns
from smoke from Canadian wildfires, a tornado warning, and a heavy thunderstorm
that gave us a pond in our backyard. I also took a trip to the ER with a calf
muscle injury that I am 98% recovered from at this point.
So, not exactly conducive to concentrated working.
I hunkered down, however, and actually have had a pretty
productive week. Since I last wrote, I proofread 40,500 words of my mother’s
family history book. And still found mistakes when I went back to quickly look
at something in a chapter I had already proofread. I will likely need to read
the entire thing one more time before giving it to someone else to proofread. My
second read-through will probably be out loud, since most of my problem is shifting
tenses, and hearing it will help me catch that.
I also updated several family trees that will go in the
book. Apparently, I have been working on this a lot longer than I thought, since
people in the trees who have died were still alive, and children who are alive
now had not been born. One chapter had no tree at all yet, so I created that
one from scratch.
Lastly, I found an image I plan to use in multiple places in
my book. One spot will likely be the back cover, and the other places will be
as backgrounds for chapter title pages. I had wanted to use maps of Ireland and
the UK in strategic places, but could not find one I liked that was not prohibited
by copyright. I finally found a line drawing of the British Isles that allows
use for reprinting in books with no copyright attached. I will, of course, be using
attribution, as they requested.
So I am making progress. After I finish the chapter I am
proofing, I have five more to proofread, and one chapter to write from scratch.
It is very hard to write a family history book while you are still actively
researching, because you keep finding more information to add!
Although there is much work remaining, it is work I enjoy,
this strange co-mingling of the quick and the dead. Through my pen, the dead
live again, and hopefully my work will live on after I am dead. Those who think
time moves only forward never viewed the world through the eyes of a
genealogist—the past is ever with us, and colors every aspect of the present.
The Quick and the Dead—CoronaLife Day 495
After being away last week, I tried to get back into the swing of things once we arrived home. We’ve had a heat wave, eerily red suns from smoke from Canadian wildfires, a tornado warning, and a heavy thunderstorm that gave us a pond in our backyard. I also took a trip to the ER with a calf muscle injury that I am 98% recovered from at this point.
So, not exactly conducive to concentrated working.
I hunkered down, however, and actually have had a pretty productive week. Since I last wrote, I proofread 40,500 words of my mother’s family history book. And still found mistakes when I went back to quickly look at something in a chapter I had already proofread. I will likely need to read the entire thing one more time before giving it to someone else to proofread. My second read-through will probably be out loud, since most of my problem is shifting tenses, and hearing it will help me catch that.
I also updated several family trees that will go in the book. Apparently, I have been working on this a lot longer than I thought, since people in the trees who have died were still alive, and children who are alive now had not been born. One chapter had no tree at all yet, so I created that one from scratch.
Lastly, I found an image I plan to use in multiple places in my book. One spot will likely be the back cover, and the other places will be as backgrounds for chapter title pages. I had wanted to use maps of Ireland and the UK in strategic places, but could not find one I liked that was not prohibited by copyright. I finally found a line drawing of the British Isles that allows use for reprinting in books with no copyright attached. I will, of course, be using attribution, as they requested.
So I am making progress. After I finish the chapter I am proofing, I have five more to proofread, and one chapter to write from scratch. It is very hard to write a family history book while you are still actively researching, because you keep finding more information to add!
Although there is much work remaining, it is work I enjoy, this strange co-mingling of the quick and the dead. Through my pen, the dead live again, and hopefully my work will live on after I am dead. Those who think time moves only forward never viewed the world through the eyes of a genealogist—the past is ever with us, and colors every aspect of the present.
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