Where, oh where does the week go? I guess for Patrick Swayze one week is a gift. For the rest of us, a week is seven days in a row where everything happens except for the fun stuff that you want to do.
Working all day long doesn’t leave time to type in a post. Then, driving home I hear something that would be a GREAT idea for a post, and start thinking about all the points to make, all the research to do to prove my point, and then, by the time I finally get home and in front of the computer, I have some other work to do, and when it’s done, it’s time to go to bed.
That great idea that I had is gone, never to come back again, until the next day when the cycle repeats. Once in a while, I’ll remember some topic on which I want to write, and I’ll have enough time to find a fact or two. Where do I save it? Not on my Google Home Page, no sir-ee. I start a post and copy the URL into it. Then I get sidetracked, start reading my feeds, checking out eBay, reading Paid Emails and other stuff.
There is good news, however, and it has nothing to do with car insurance. The good news, my friends, is that during all my sidetracks and zig-zagging through the Internet, I have finally learned what the Internet is for. You may be as surprised as I think you might be, but when you really think about it, the Internet is really for one thing. No, it’s not for spreading information around through a decentralized system of servers. It’s not even for making money. It is for one thing, and one thing only.
A long, long, time ago, in a county, far, far away—actually it was 3 years ago in the next county over—I was researching my genealogy. Well, it wasn’t actually researching more as I was searching on-line for someone who was “close enough” to the person I was searching that I would add it to my files. I wasn’t checking facts, just adding as quickly as I could find. Then, in the month or so before I moved, the computer I was using for my research stopped working.
So I have started fresh. The primary source of my genealogy was Some Descendants of Justus Harris, by Sydney Mike Gardner. I also have a Pease line, and my uncle has an original copy of A genealogical and historical record of the descendants of John Pease, Sen. by David Pease from over 100 years ago. I looked through it for a while, and sent it back to him before I moved. Anyway, with the Harris book, I am going back through it to create a gedcom with all the original sources. I guess I can just make all the sources to be Some Descendants of Justus Harris, by Sydney Mike Gardner, but that would probably be defeating the purpose.
Sydney Mike, if you’re out there, or if you’re someone else with a transcription of the book, please contact me. I would like to have a gedcom of the book, and only the book, completely separate from anything else. I have started fresh, but it’s going to take some time for my current genealogy to make it back to where it was, back in the heyday of not caring if it’s accurate. One thing I look forward to is getting actual sources that say that I am the fifth-cousin of James “Wild Bill” Butler Hickock six-times removed. Maybe it was sixth-cousin five-times removed. That’s why I need to research it again.
