January Ruminations

Before My Time doesn't have an official blogiversary. It began before it began; i.e., I was blogging elsewhere when I wrote my first few family history posts. Toward the end of 2006, I was reviewing the blog where I'd posted them, and it occurred to me that I wanted to collect those posts in a topical blog of their own. I set up this blog and relocated my family history posts here, backdating them to their original dates.

At that point, I had neither seen nor heard of any other blogs with a focus on genealogy. It didn't take long, though, before I realized I couldn't possibly be the only one with this idea, and I looked around for others. If I remember correctly, Dana Huff's Our Family History was the first one I discovered. Her participation in the Carnival of Genealogy led me to Creative Gene, and from there I found myself part of a small community which, since then, has grown large enough to have considerable influence in the genealogy industry.

I've never been particularly 'groupish,' and I don't often participate in memes, carnivals, and such. But I'm enriched in many ways by my fellow genealogy bloggers--I learn, I am entertained, I am encouraged, I am stimulated, I am exposed to new ideas, old photographs, unusual methods, and varying opinions. That's certainly not an exhaustive list, but my point is probably made.

Before My Time is written essentially for an audience that doesn't quite exist--family members who don't read it, ancestors who are dead and don't care, descendants who haven't been born yet. I also write it for myself, as a way of working with the materials I've gathered, organizing my thoughts, and writing them down so I won't forget what I've figured out and what I'm still wondering about.

Nevertheless, the audience that actually does exist--largely my fellow bloggers of genealogy and family history--is a great and treasured stand-in for that other audience, and I'm glad to have the support of such a terrific group of friends.

------------

January Accomplishments

Cheryl and I made Randy's Best of the Genea-Blogs list this week with the series In Search of the Schulte Line. I've already read most of his other picks for the week, and I am honored to be included in such excellent company! Thanks, Randy! And Cheryl, thanks for being half of The Superpower of Two!

Including this one, I've posted 13 times this month. That's twice my overall average (to compute, I included only months in which I had at least one post).

Most of this month's efforts were part of the Schulte series, for which Cheryl and I found a good number of new documents.

I labelled two dozen file folders and filled them with non-genealogy-related papers that were crowding the top of my desk. Now it's only genealogy papers that are crowding the top of my desk.

I finally got my family tree set up!

I decided what my photo book will be about--well, who--and that there will be plenty of text, and I started typing a chronology that includes lots of news articles from Chronicling America and Winona Newspaper Project.

And in the other column . . .

The New Year's Resolution? That baby went down in flames! I intended to do fact-checking and source-writing for one grandparent a day, but at this point I have exactly three grandparents finished, and those were done before the new year even began. I may have to separate the fact-checking from the source-entering, because despite Legacy's fabulous SourceWriter, it's still a job I obsess over, which makes it a time-consuming ordeal, which--well, I'm sure I don't have to tell anyone this tale. Everyone hates this job, right?