I’ve had this file on my computer for a while and I keep tinkering with it and then ignoring it again, but the recent talk of H5N1 virus (bird flu) particularly in the US, a country that no longer has protective health safeguards to prevent spreading their diseases to the rest of us out here in the real world, reminded me yet again how vulnerable we are to pandemics.
If you feel inclined to take me up on this little challenge, my only feature-request it that you give it a reasonable name. All I ask for is something that I can talk to my friends and family about without their instant reaction being – WTF does that mean!
Scottish naming patterns can be a great help when researching family history, but they can also be very frustrating when trying to write unambiguously about those same ancestors, and when a brother marries a girl with the same name as his sister and that sister is the one who is named after their mother, those matching cousins can end up with a grandmother, mother and aunt all called Christina…
Returning to the blog, after being distracted by other things, with thoughts on distraction and weirdness.
The #52Ancestors prompt this week is changing Names, so I’ve written about my Desrez side of the family, whose French surname has been modified and mangled by Australians, and other English speakers for the past 170 years
This weeks #52Ancestors challenge – Origins prompted me to look at the concept of foreignness.
As we approach another arbitrary temporal boundary, or New Year as some would have it, I am prompted to consider my place in the world and my responsibilities to society. So because social media reflects so much of society these days, I reflect on social media. As a member of […]
I decided celebrate my fedi-versary by finishing a half written blog post from a few weeks ago, about xitter v mastodon. I had got bored before finishing it, but the purpose of the blog is supposed to be to leave information about the past for my grandchildren and other descendants, […]
A genealogy question on Mastodon, about households containing people with identical names, started me thinking about the number of different version of names we find in old documents and I wondered if it might be explained by the tendency in times past to name children after parents or grandparents, or […]
I have a letter found in my Grandfather’s desk, which illustrates the lengths to which we need to go to work out what our ancestors were doing. I guess they never imagined that we would be trawling through their letters and their lives 100 years or more after they had died, or what we’d be able to find out.