Wordless Wednesday - Four Generations

This picture contains four generations of my grandmother's family! On the left is Nils (Nelson) Pehrsson, my great great great grandfather. Beside him (back row) is his daughter, my great great grandmother, Alice Mary Peterson. Beside her is her daughter, my great grandmother, Mildred Grace Watts. In the front is Mildred's eldest daughter, my grandma's sister, Dorothy Angus.

Preserving my childhood memories

Yesterday, I was looking for a picture of myself from elementary school to scan. So I pulled out my old School Days Treasures book, a book which has way more stuff in it than it was ever meant to hold, so it's bursting at the seams, and is consequently really hard to browse through.

As I did this, it occurred to me to that I should be scanning this stuff. That my overstuffed collection of school work, school photos, report cards, certificates, etc., probably won't last forever, but that I could still keep it forever on a tiny little flash drive (or two; backups are important!).

So I can add that to my list of massive scanning projects! After I finish my grandma's photos, I'd like to do all my School Days Treasures stuff, and eventually all my photos from my pre-digital camera days.

And then there's my dad's collection of pictures. I'm afraid to even fathom how big a job that will be. Not only did my parents take about a gazillion pictures when my sister and I were kids, but my dad also inherited his mother's photo collection. So it'll be a while before I'm short of things to scan! :)

For now, enjoy this cute picture of a grade 4 me, when I was finally starting to grow into my two front teeth!

What I've been up to

I've been suffering from a bit of writer's block of late. But I'm still here! Just a bit quieter than usual... So I thought I'd give a quick update on what I've been up to lately.

I've been working on my one place study of St. François Xavier. I haven't gotten a whole lot done on that yet, since I only have Saturday mornings to work on it, and one Saturday a little trip to the emergency room took up my whole day and sort of ruined my plans. But other than that I've worked on it every Saturday, and another researcher there gave me the idea of photographing the pages I'm transcribing, so I can work on them at home. I don't have a professional camera, just a little digital one, but it's worth a shot! If I can take pictures that are as easy to read as the paper copies, then that could really speed up my work on this project! So I'll be trying that out this weekend.

I've also started on a website for the one place study. I got some space at Freepages (did you know you can get free web space there for genealogy?!), and so far I've put hardly anything on it, and it's very plain and ugly. But eventually it will be pretty and full of information! You can visit my Freepages here.

Other than that, I've mostly been working on my Acadian ancestors on WikiTree. Not doing a whole lot of research, just merging profiles and starting to add some sources (pretty much just the censuses). Soon I plan to add sources from Stephen A. White, because it turns out that a copy of his Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes (basically the Bible of Acadian genealogy, and rather hard to find) is at the St. Boniface Historical Society! So sometime soon I'll be making time to flip excitedly through that. :-)

I got photo albums!!

Yay! I just went on a shopping spree at Michael's, and the most exciting part of today's haul is two great big acid-free, lignin-free photo albums! They were a whopping $30 each on sale, but each one holds 400 4x6in. pictures! Which means that all the pictures I've scanned so far would fit in one and not even fill it.

So, I'm going to start moving the photos I've already scanned into a new album. Then, I'll get back to my scanning (which has been neglected lately since it didn't feel worth the effort when I didn't have these new albums to move the pictures into yet), and as I scan I'll move those photos into the new albums. Then I can toss those awful magnetic photo albums and my grandma's photos can avoid disintegration for a while longer! :)

Me right now, admiring my fancy new albums:

Rating My Genealogical Maturity - 2012

Through a recent blog post on Tonia's Roots I have found the Genealogical Maturity Model on The Ancestry Insider. While I don't agree with everything on it, I think it will be useful to help me identify areas of my genealogical work that could use some improvement.

So, here's my assessment as of right now, leaving out the Conclusion Trees section, which I find unpleasantly elitist (and apparently I'm not alone in that):

Sources

#	Level	Sources	Check
1.	Entry	Typically relies on compiled genealogies.
2.	Emerging	Mostly relies on compiled genealogies and online sources.
3.	Practicing	Uses a limited number of record types and repositories. Mostly relies on online and microfilmed sources.	x
4.	Proficient	Uses a wide variety of record types. Often contacts record custodians to obtain copies of high-quality sources.
5.	Stellar	Insightfully pursues research at multiple, targeted repositories, making use of a plethora of records and record types. "Burned counties" are not roadblocks.

The number of record types I use is increasing all the time, but I still don't use much that isn't available online. The parish records I'm looking at now for my One Place Study are probably the first offline records I've used.

Citations

#	Level	Citations	Check
1.	Entry	Captures URLs for online sources and citations for published sources.	x
2.	Emerging	Increasingly captures necessary information for manuscript sources.
3.	Practicing	Typically produces complete source citations.
4.	Proficient	Gives complete and accurate source citations including provenance and quality assessment.
5.	Stellar	Overcomes limitations of genealogical software to create well organized, industry standard reference notes and source lists.

OK, I admit it. Most of my citations are just links to the record online. I really should work on this.

Information

#	Level	Information	Check
1.	Entry	Typically does not realize the need to judge information quality and has no basis for doing so.
2.	Emerging	Emerging realization that information quality differs. Muddles evaluation by thinking of primary/secondary sources instead of primary/secondary information, leading to muddled evaluation when sources contain both.
3.	Practicing	Judges information by source type, informant knowledge, and record timing. Applies "primary/secondary" to information instead of sources.	x
4.	Proficient	Additionally, learns history necessary to recognize and evaluate all explicit information in a source.
5.	Stellar	Additionally, utilizes implicit information in a source. Finds information in cases like illegitimacy that stump most researchers.

Evidence

#	Level	Evidence	Check
1.	Entry	Limited understanding of evidence and the role it plays. Typically ignores conflicting evidence.
2.	Emerging	Captures direct, supporting evidence and increasingly depends upon it.
3.	Practicing	Additionally, captures directly conflicting evidence.
4.	Proficient	Additionally, recognizes and captures indirect, supporting evidence.	x
5.	Stellar	Additionally, recognizes and captures indirect, conflicting evidence.

Conclusions

#	Level	Conclusions	Check
1.	Entry	In the absence of analysis, reaches conclusions by instinct.
2.	Emerging	Learning to evaluate the quality of sources, information, and evidence. Emerging ability to resolve minor discrepancies.
3.	Practicing	Additionally, resolves conflicting evidence or uses it to disprove prevalent opinion. Usually applies correct identity to persons mentioned in sources.	x
4.	Proficient	Additionally, when necessary creates soundly reasoned, coherently documented conclusions utilizing direct and indirect evidence.
5.	Stellar	Additionally: Publishes clear and convincing conclusions. Teaches and inspires others.

Overall Level

Category	Level
Sources	3
Citations	1
Information	3
Evidence	4
Conclusions	3
AVERAGE	2.8

So, just under Practicing. Not quite the result I was hoping for! Obviously, citations are what I need to work on the most. So as a next step, I think I'll look up what citation formats are standard in the genealogical community, and start applying them to my citations on WikiTree. That, and my New Year's resolutions...

I got an award!

Lora from whippersnappergenealogist awarded me the Liebster Blog Award! This award is given to blogs that have fewer than 200 followers and deserve more recognition and encouragement. I'm so touched! :)

In a process that is suspiciously like chain mail, this is how it works:

1. Thank your Liebster Blog Award presenter on your blog.
2. Link back to the blogger who awarded you.
3. Put the award on your blog.
4. Nominate 5 blogs to receive the award.
5. Inform them of their nomination by leaving a comment on their blog.

So, here are the bloggers I'd like to show a little love to today! (I'm gonna cheat and only do 3, out of a combination of laziness and the fact that I follow lots of blogs with more than 200 followers.)

The Demanding Genealogist: I was happy when I found this blog, because I think we're all guilty of less-than-scrupulous genealogy at times, and I appreciate having someone around calling us out on that! Even her blog posts are better cited than most of my WikiTree profiles!

Adventures in Genealogy: Deb gets this award most because of her Follow Friday Gems posts! On Fridays, she links to an amazing collection of great genealogy sites, articles, etc. that she finds around the web. Very useful!

Tangled Trees: Almost nothing on this blog has anything to do with my own genealogical research, and yet it's always interesting. With lots of pictures and interesting tidbits, there's something for everyone!

Joining WikiTree by invitation

You may have heard the news that WikiTree has gone invitation-only. This means that in order to join, you have to be invited by someone who is already a member.

Well, I'm already a member! So I just wanted to let my fellow geneabloggers (and anyone else who reads this blog) know that you can ask me for an invitation. The idea of this change is not to keep people from joining WikiTree. It's meant to slow things down a bit, and stop what was happening before, which was a lot of people joining just to dump their GEDCOMs there and forget them. That's not what WikiTree is about. If you join, it should be to participate in building the worldwide tree, which means being willing to merge profiles with other people and collaborate.

So, if you respect the WikiTree Honour Code and want to join this amazing community of genealogists, contact me for an invitation.