Genealogical Proof—CoronaLife Day 670

January 13, 2022 By Leave a Comment

Ask and you shall receive! I got my proofreading copy for my genealogy book back last weekend, so I have been diligently making or rejecting changes.

There’s a lot to look at.

Some are genuine mistakes. Some are things perfectly clear to me that confused readers who have not been immersed in this for 20+ years. Some are things I decided not to change because they weren’t actually mistakes.

One thing I should have explained to the proofreaders is that ages and spellings are elastic until after 1900, and even sometimes then. Many people were illiterate, so spellings were at the mercy of whoever was taking the dictation. I once had someone write an ancestor’s name as “Eva Murray”, leading to a long chase for an Irishman in early 19th century Germany. Turns out her name was Eva Marie, and her immigrant husband’s heavy German accent was misheard by the clerk.

Ages floated a lot, too. People lied to go to war, to get married, to appear younger than their husbands. Many people honestly didn’t know their exact birth year. Until Social Security, it really wasn’t necessary to know. So genealogist get accustomed to a certain amount of drift in ages. Ancestors are simultaneously 40 and 37 and 52—it all depends when you look.

Schrodinger’s relatives.

Still, the proofreaders did a fantastic job. I am inching my way through. I have 4 more chapters to do, then all the photo and graphic captions. I hope to have it completed by Monday.

I will still have to go in and edit it severely to bring the page count down. I hate to lose so much fun historical stuff. So I am considering keeping the longer version and making it available as a PDF giveaway with purchase of the book. We shall see.

How is your new year kicking off?

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

December 23, 2021 By Leave a Comment

The past few weeks have been hectic, as this time of year often is. Add a sick child in, and it’s a little more fraught than normal.

I am awaiting my family history book from my proofreaders. I have gathered all the title pages, trees, and photos, so once I clean up the text, I will be ready to go. I may have some significant trimming to do, as I realized that this book is 290 pages, while the other one I did was only 145. I don’t mind the book being longer, but I am afraid the price point would be prohibitive.

I just hopped on today to wish everyone who celebrates a Merry Christmas! If you celebrate something else, enjoy your holiday season! And I wish everyone a happy, healthy, and safe New Year!

See you all in 2022!

Growing Trees—CoronaLife Day 558

September 23, 2021 By Leave a Comment

I have reached a milestone in the genealogy book—I finished the text! It is compiled, and indexed and 92,000 words long. I have a date with the proofreaders, and then off to the races.

In the meanwhile, I am working on the inserts for the book—photos, trees, chapter title pages. I thought I had finished the trees already, but I was wrong. A month or so ago, my mother had asked for a detailed tree of her maternal side of the family from her grandparents down, including all aunts and uncles and their children and grandchildren. I made it for her, and then thought I would include it in the book (the private version, not the public version, as some of these people are living).

Of course, then I thought I should do the same for my mom’s paternal side, just to be fair and complete. Only two of the aunts on that side had children, so I thought it would be fairly easy. Famous last words. One branch we had lost touch with, so it took a lot of digging to find out what happened to them and to get down to the required generation. I still don’t know when the aunt herself died, although I have clues. The other branch was easier because we knew the people, but I had to do some research to find birth and death information.

So all that tree-growing took much more time than I expected, and has taken up the bulk of my week thus far. But now I have completed that and can say for sure that this time I have finished all the trees! I began pulling the photos I wanted to use, and I can clean them up in a couple of days. The chapter title pages may or may not be a headache—it depends how easily the graphic I got to use for it can be manipulated. In theory it shouldn’t be hard, but you know the saying, “I’d love to live in Theory, because everything works there.”

So that’s my latest project update. The proofreaders won’t get to it until November, but that gives me plenty of time to work on the inserts and get them ready to go. I will likely do a cover design, too, but that is harder to do until I know the exact dimensions and get the cover template from the printer.

So how are your projects going?

Busy Week – CoronaLife Day 530

August 26, 2021 By Leave a Comment

Summertime is hard when you don’t have a 9 to 5 job, because it is so easy to lose track of what day it is. I forgot yesterday was Wednesday, and I hadn’t written this blog!

It’s been a crazy busy week for me: two meetings in my Board of Education capacity, plus a financial review with the local PTA. Lots of preparation time for those, plus the time for the meetings themselves. After so many months at home, these bursts of activity (especially in-person/social activity) exhaust me quickly.

Because of those other commitments, I have not gotten a ton of work done on my genealogy project, but I did make some progress. I now have three chapters to finish proofing and indexing. Then I will need to fix the formatting in the compiled book, and start working on the photos and other inserts. So I am edging closer to the finish line.

Going shopping for school supplies for my daughter tomorrow. We combed through her “art room” and found lots of things on the list, so it’s much shorter than it was originally. Biggest thing will be her backpack, which I waited far too long to order online and will now not arrive here until later in September. We will have to make do with the older backpack, which is still serviceable, but too small for everything she will need to carry.

In other news, Zippy the fish, although still with us, is probably not long for this world. He has been expanding with some sort of internal tumor for a couple of months (we had another fish that died of one), and although he still eats every day and swims, his behavior makes us think he is winding down. He rests a lot and “pastes” himself against the walls sometimes, as if for support. We thought he was dead yesterday, but he wasn’t—just hanging out at the bottom of the tank.

My crazy week is at an end, and hopefully I can push through those last (fairly long) chapters in the genealogy book this coming week.

I hope the last few weeks of summer are treating you all well!

The Quick and the Dead—CoronaLife Day 495

July 22, 2021 By Leave a Comment

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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