Today is. . .
World Back Up Day! Back up your digital files. Back up your photographs. Back up your genealogy.
Posts
In the Mail. . .
The newsletter is in the mail. . . did you get your copy? photographs from the Rock Springs Historical Museum. 9 September 2013
Happy Birthday to Margaret Roberts(13)
Born: 29 March 1870 (144 years ago today) Died at age 7 from an accident
1965 History Notes. . .
"In order to restore Clio to her once high estate as not least of the Muses, her devotees must do something beside print documents, dig out facts and marshal them in sober prose; they must write in three dimensions, as it were, drawing not only on records but on their own experience and background knowledge, to re-create the past. A historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view as a navigator, after taking sounding off a strange coast, retires to peruse his charts and then emerges to give the necessary orders to continue the voyage safely. And I would add that it is even more important now to write history in three dimensions, because the background, the common knowledge that one could assume in 1901, has slipped away, driven out by the internal-combustion engine, nuclear fission and Dr. Freud. A historian must constantly keep in mind his expected publi...
Brick Wall Ideas:
Re-examine and look closely at the documents and sources you have. You have more information now, than when you first looked at the document, so you will see things differently. Information on those documents may mean more to you now. Look at EVERYTHING on the document—witnesses, notes in the columns, the previous page and the next page especially on census records. Look at the neighbors on the census records; do they have the same surname? Try searching 5 pages before and 5 pages after your ancestor. Re-consider the spellings and misspellings of the surname. The further back in time that you go, the less educated people were. In addition to the lack of education, you may have immigrants who were speaking a new language with a heavy accent, trying to give information! Draw a...
Quote
Swiftly the brain becomes an enchanted loom, where millions of flashing shuttle weave a dissolving pattern— always a meaningful pattern— though never an abiding one. ---Sir Charles Sherrington
