Saturday, June 11, 2011

Research Journal

I've been researching my Weeks Family roots for about 8 years now. I'm retired and I'm a Windsurfer. I moved to South Padre Island, Texas in 2003. I'm fortunate enough to have my health (thank you Lord), and to be able to enjoy my three most favorite things: Windsurfing, Genealogy and a good action adventure book. Mornings for genealogy and afternoons for windsurfing. Every now and then there is a chore that gets in the way but that's life.

Regarding genealogy, when I first started researching my family everything was new and thrilling. So much information to read through, so much “stuff” to collect and store. You know the drill, “this piece is interesting, I need to save it, I might need it some time......” I guess that logic is what leads to mountains papers to be stored, extra hard drives and a indexing systems that ensures you'll never find what your looking for and reams of paper and more printer cartridges than you can imagine.

But best of all, looking at a piece a paper thinking that you'll never need it but you need to file it anyway. Then years later you come across that piece of paper only to find that it's information helps you solve a problem you've been chasing for years. But why wasn't that obvious the first time you read that doc? Then you start second guessing yourself, what other treasures do I have buried, What did I do with this and that...., and on it goes.

Part of my problem in researching is time. Not like I don't have the time it's more like the need for instant gratification. I spend 35+ years in the high tech business and in that industry you had milliseconds to solve a problem and the life of that solution had even a shorter life span. Well, not really but it sure felt that way. But genealogy is just the opposite. Genealogy moves at the speed of a glacier. Talk about stopping to smell the roses, with genealogy you have time to plant the seed and watch the darn rose grow old and then fall away.

But the happy ending to this story is this blog. This blog gives me a place to write about my frustrations and to organize my research results. The process of writing something out and then posting it, even if I'm the only person who will ever read it, give me the feeling of accomplishing something.

1 comment:

Amy Coffin, MLIS said...

I love the stated purpose of your blog. I do so for similar reasons.