Fish don't realize
they are in water. We walk around in our
own water, prisoners, if you will, of electricity, indoor plumbing, cars,
computers, synthetic fibers in clothing, progressive lenses, frozen food, etc., etc. A favorite science-fiction book of mine
postulates that if you could break all the threads that hold you to the 20th
century, you could literally walk around the corner and enter a different
time.
Time to encourage
the childlike, not childish, but childlike.
Time to dream, time to wonder, time to consider ala the world of Mrs.
Piggle-Wiggle, who had her house built upside down so the ceiling fixtures
could be campfires. Very strange to her
neighbors, but not to the children who came to visit her. Or consider the world of "Imogene's
Antlers" (where a young girl wakes with antlers, and she spends the day
figuring out how they could be useful!).
Time to consider that a pencil is also an eraser with a handle. I know, I've used that one before, but so
much of genealogy is turning off our contemporary surround to 1) see the
information as coming from a world with different basic construct, and 2) to
rotate the specifics of the information around to see it in a different way and
sometimes, at 'just that angle' it connects and joins pieces that have been
floating for years.
So ….
Consider… as
genealogists, whether we realize it or not, we are time travelers. We do much of our work in the 19th century
and before. Where we travel, names are
not stable in their spelling, adults may be illiterate, information is kept
orally, people do move, and on and
on. We enter a world where most is done
by natural light, where labor is cheap and goods expensive, where walking long
distances is normal, and most telling of all, where the parameters that surround
how life is conducted are different… not
better or worse, but different.
Not possible in
January, but for the spring/summer, think of taking a trip to a historical
reenactment - visit the civil war or farm harvesting -- or going somewhere where you can walk
through a gate into another time -- Plymouth Plantation, Mass, and Conner
Prairie, Indiana are two that I have visited.
The residents (aka staff) are well schooled in their time and their
attitudes. In Plymouth, one wife was
sure that the rose infused oil rubbed into her husband's temples cured his
headaches; when questioned she was quite
sure it was the oil and not the rubbing.
In Conner Prairie, a traveler was thankful that she had paid extra for a
private room because otherwise she would have had to share a room with the
traveling players, "and we all know what kind of people they are."
This is longer than
the ones following…. Neither of us has this much time.. !!!
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2018 begins with an "ABC-darium," a walk through the alphabet expanding into short comments on matters genealogical. Published on Tuesday and some Fridays, a letter may be visited more than once before moving on.
Copyright 2018, SERoss