Musings on Data

From the NY Times - Sunday, Sept 23, 2012

I will often read newspaper articles about the internet and social media, and yesterday's NY Times front page offered this article about how much electrical power "the cloud" takes. (As with many very long articles, I read until I feel I've gotten the main point and then my eyes glaze over...)

Anyway, as I read this article I thought about how genealogists search and search for any kind of data they can find on their ancestors. A birth, marriage or death certificate, census records, etc. We are fortunate if we can find some more personal information about the person, especially a diary, letters or even a memoir.

Future genealogists will have a much different problem. How will they sort through the mountains of data on each person? I think about all the data I have for myself. I have all the letters that my mom wrote to my grandma during the 1960s, the letters I wrote to my parents when I went to college and in the early years of my marriage before I started using email as well as the letters I wrote to H during those periods where we were apart. I also have saved so many emails. I have this blog. I have scrapbooks and the journals I kept in college. It goes on and on.

Do I think that people will actually care about this in the future? I like to think I will go back through all this old stuff, but really, I probably will look at less than 1% of it all. Maybe it's just comforting to me to know that I can look at my past self should I ever feel the need.

However, I may want to go through it and purge the most embarrassing stuff on the off chance that someone will one day actually go through it.....

History Pin

For all you history buffs and genealogists out there, here is a new site, historypin that lets you pin old photos to a map or view other people's photos. Go to the map and see what is there already, then add your own. There aren't many pictures from the IE yet, but I hope that will change soon....

Wisconsin Historical Society

I don't know why it's taken me so long, but I finally sent away for my grandmother's grandparents' marriage license from 1896.  (Perhaps it's the release of the 1940 census that inspired me to.) We've had so little information on these particular ancestors, but I did manage to find out that I could order a photocopy of said license from the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Well, it arrived in the mail today, and I was pleased to find that it offered up the names of the bride's and groom's parents.  I also found out that this great-great grandmother was not born in the town that I had previously thought (Ellsworth, Wisconsin), but in neighboring Trimbelle (5 miles due west of Ellsworth).

This set me off on a few hour's worth of internet digging, and I came up with one more generation of ancestors (one born in Tennessee - I never knew!), as well as a variety of spellings of one great grandmother's maiden names.

1940 Census

Quite recently, the government released the 1940 census for public consumption.  The 72-year privacy restriction has passed, so now family historians have a new treasure trove of information to sift through.

I have done a preliminary scan for my parents and grandparents and found them right away.  However, since I don't have exact addresses of my great and great-great grandparents, and some of them lived in Minneapolis (a large city with lots of pages), I can see where some of my summer vacation is going to be spent.

In Sunday's NY Times magazine I read the entire article about how digital games can monopolize your life, but this genealogy thing can rival digital games for one's attention....

Genealogy Find

My friend, Kathy, is big into genealogy, and today she came over to show me some stuff on the internet. With her help, I was able to dig up the WW I draft registration card of my mother's grandfather. Here it is!