Brenner Genealogy

Christmas is not a just day.  Instead, it is a 12 day celebration that begins (in some traditions) on December 25th and continues for 12 days (until January 6th).  As a reminder, we have the 12 Days of Christmas carol. 

Many have suggested that this carol is, in reality, a catechism — that is, a learning device in which each of the gifts represents a gift from God:  a partridge in a pear tree = Jesus; two turtle doves = the Old and New Testaments; an so forth.  Such an interpretation, as intriguing and useful as that may be in some settings, has little relationship to the song in its original setting.  Sometimes “three French hens” are just chickens.

For each of the 12 days of Christmas, I will be posting one event / person from genealogical research that relates (sometimes in a rather convoluted way)  to the particular gift of that day in The 12 Days of Christmas. Although the 1st day of Christmas is actually Christmas day itself, I will start my posts on December 26. (I plan on being with my 5 & 7 year old grandkids on Christmas day.)  I invite you to join me. Here is my outline of the 12 Genealogy Days of Christmas.

Dec. 26 – Partridge in a Pear Tree
The partridge belongs to “a non-migratory Old World group.”    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partridge
When your ancestors come to this country (that is, the country in which you now reside) who did they leave behind?   Also, Who did they travel with? and/or  Who did they come to join? (Who proceded them?)

Dec. 27 – Two Turtle Doves
Turtle doves are “migratory birds whose population in Europe has allen by 62% in recent times due to changed farming practices.”   Who is your most recent direct line ancestor to have immigrated to your current country?  Why did they come?  Was it for economic reasons or for adventure or to avoid something back in their country of origin?

Dec. 28 – Three French Hens
French hens were just domesticated chickens.    Where does your genealogy have French connections?  Who migrated into France?  or from France to elsewhere?  Did any of your immigrant ancestors sail from France?

Dec. 29 – Four Collie Birds
No! Not “calling” birds (whatever they might be).  The original lyrics of this carol has “collie birds” which were simply blackbirds.   Perhaps you remember the Beatles song, Blackbird:  “Blackbird singing in the dead of night / Take these broken wing and learn to fly / All your life / you were only waiting for this moment to arise.”   Paul McCartney writes: “Those were the days of the civil rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: ‘Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope. “  Who among your ancestors has taken “broken wings and learn[ed] to fly?  or Who has cared pasionately enough to do something about those who are learning to fly with broken wings?

Dec. 30 – Five Golden Rings.
We immediately think of jewelry, but the original intent of the song was to continue the focus on birds.  Therefore we have golden ring-neck pheasants in this days gift.  Pheasants have been called a very distinctive and colorful species.  Today, post a photo of a well-dressed, distinctive, colorful ancestor.  (Yes, black and white, or sepia photo are very acceptable.  Color can be more a matter of mind than of vision.

Dec. 31 – Six Geese A-Laying
Symbolically, eggs represent renewal of life.    Who among your ancestors had the largest family?  How many of the children lived into adulthood?  Share a picture if you have one.

(Due to length, I will contue this in a second post.)

Actually, we no longer have a cat around the house.  But I do remember the time when Midnight, as a kitten, pulled over our Christmas tree.  I felt that way as I was previewing a new blog post.  After finding what I thought was a spectacular Christmas theme for this blog, all of a sudden the blog design was compromised.  I don’t know what happened and I am only marginally conversant with HTML markup language, so I decided on a quick change of template and theme for the Holiday season.  I am only marginally pleased with the look now, but it will suffice until after the first of the year, when I return to my original design.

The mantra of real estate agents is “Location! Location! Location!” I am beginning to think that this may also be the mantra of genealogists.

I have the distinct pleasure of participating in an online study group — twelve of us exporling American Records using Greenwood’s “The Researcher’s Guide to American Records” and “The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy” by Eicholz, et al.

I am beginning to find an answer to a question I raised when dealing with an assignment on “organizing our data.” At the time, I mused: “I am curious about why Greenwood considers locality such a primary factor in a research organizer. Can anyone explain that to me?”
A little over a month later, I began to get an answer to that question when reading William Dollarhide’s “Managing a Genealogical Project.” He writes “There are three vital pieces of [genealogical] information … (1) a name, (2) a date, and (3) a place. …Of these three, the place is the one that tells you where to look for further information. The place of the event … is what a genealogist must know before a copy of that record can be obtained.”

Dollarhide’s input helped me better understand Greenwood’s concern, but it didn’t convince me that I needed to change anything that I was currently doing. More recently I read James Tanner’s post entitled “Searching 40 TB of Records on an iPad,” which draws from a NARA report on the 2011 Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV) symposium. Based on NARA’s work, Tanner suggests four areas in which genealogical researchers need to develop greater proficiency, especially as “large record repositories … make more of their collections available electronically.” One of the areas he suggests relates directly to the concern for locality. “Genealogists need to understand maps and be more consistent in recording the location of events. … The whole NARA project points out the geographical basis for nearly all organizations of record collections.”

As users of websites with huge datasets (such as Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org), we continuely face the frustration of changed search templates for accessing wanted data. It’s “old search” versus “new search;” “New search” versus “newer search;” etc. etc. etc. We expect the proprieters of websites with large datasets to have perfected their search engines so that we can find easily the data we are looking for.  I never even thought about how they might organize their data or how their search engines operated.  I just knew that when I typed in my 2g-grandfather’s name, I expected to find all the records for him that existed in their datasets.  Of course, I was always frustrated when the searches provided either 124,728 results (too general a search) or 0 results (too many “exact” filters in my search).

Of course, we don’t develop sophisticated search engines to access our own data – whether it is stored in physical file folders and filing cabinets or in digital folders on hard drives and/or the Cloud. We either just look until we find or we have a simple tracking system.  My files (4.6 GB) are in stored in a) in my 2TB external hard drive, b) on Box.net, and c) in my online Research Wiki.  They are filed by name and, in the WIKI, cross-referenced by event type.  The only files I have by location are some histories of particular location. I can’t imagine having to look through a personal storage system with 40 TB or more of data. Then I would truly need a rather sophisticated and complex personal search engine. In the environment of large datasets, locality (geospatial information) seems to be the key ingredient for genealogical records.  As I access my records, my primary concern is for the people in my family tree.  That’s how my records are organized.

My conclusion from this: I don’t need to change my organizational system, but I do need to be more aware of the central importance of locality as I continue to search online providers of large data sets. Without that awareness, I might find myself having access to less and less records, rather than more and more!