Jill Morelli analyzes ten NGSQ articles

I'm delighted to see another blogger, Jill Morelli over at Genealogy Certification: My Personal Journal, publicly reading and analyzing the best work in the field, here and here, under the heading of "Analyzing Ten NGSQ Articles."

She has a different approach to them than I had thought of. Any time the National Genealogical Society Quarterly and other top journals can get a fraction of the social-media exposure that software updates and misleading television shows routinely receive, I'm all for it. Additional publicity here.

Now that I think of it, this blog has gotten away from posting about these journals in recent weeks...


Harold Henderson, "Jill Morelli analyzes ten NGSQ articles," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Your Unsourced Undated Newspaper Clipping, Blogging, and Michigan State Censuses

Sometimes other genealogists provoke us to remember things we had forgotten.

* I once had one of those classic unlabeled newspaper clippings, one that would gain credibility if it could be properly sourced. And there is one often distinctive identifier that even the most clueless newspaper-clipper can't erase: the font, typeface, and layout. Fortunately I had reason to think that it belonged to a particular town and an approximate point in time. I made a copy of it and took it to the local library, and compared it to the two local newspapers being published then. One of them matched, reducing the search time required to find the original -- but not to zero!

* Wondering what to blog about, or whether even to start? Although I don't use them, Geneabloggers offers a myriad of "blogging prompts" keyed to days of the week. There are some basic decisions to make: do you want mainly to contribute original material, or be an aggregator of others (by mentioning and linking, not wholesale copying!)? In either case, what really "gets you going" about genealogy: a particular region? methodology? theory? family stories? technology? conferences and institutes? Start out with a focus based on the passion within your passion; over time you will find that it changes, as this blog has. Finally, plan a schedule and work far enough ahead of it so that you can read your draft posts "cold" one more time before publishing them. That way you can be a perfectionist within reason and still get it done.

* I've said this before, and now I'm saying it again: if you have Michigan people, you should be reading Bushwhacking Genealogy, which just reported on progress in digitizing early Michigan state censuses.




Harold Henderson, "Your Unsourced Undated Newspaper Clipping, Blogging, and Michigan State Censuses," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 April 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

One Thousand and Counting

According to Blogger, this is my one-thousandth post since Midwestern Microhistory opened up 23 January 2008. Not a huge deal, since those geneabloggers who started sooner and/or post oftener whizzed past this milepost a long time back.

This blog still benefits from my daughter-in-law's original layout, but its original relentless focus on the Midwest has been relieved a bit by doses of methodology. (It's true: when I started blogging I had yet to hear Tom Jones speak.) But my heart and my business remain close to Chicago, however much the occasional blizzard or drought makes me wish otherwise. 

Blogging tends to be impromptu, unedited (except sometimes in remorseful afterthought), brief, occasional, sometimes disputations, and always sociable. I have argued elsewhere that its spirit predates the net. When I have to explain blogging to non-bloggers, I say that a blog is a cross between an email and a web site: a temporary communication that stays put and that folks can see later. Not sure that helps much.

In principle blogging on the internet should make us more honest. It's a web log, and that implies linking. We might want to say, for instance, that members of the other political party are morons, or that the "genealogy police" are abusing innocent hobbyists on a regular basis. If we're talking or writing for print, 20th-century style, we can just make the claim and hope no one asks for evidence. But if we're blogging, we are expected -- if not morally obligated -- to link to an example of what we're talking about. It shouldn't be that hard to do (even if our claim turns out to be false, there should be a plausible example somewhere). And if we can't find anything to link to that illustrates our point, then maybe our thesis is flawed and should be retired for the time being in favor of a post about a new record type, or some cute pictures of kittens or grandchildren.

Sometimes blogging is real writing (by which I mean not fancy but something that sticks with you), and sometimes it's the prelude to it. I think it suits genealogy well, because both enterprises rest on the firm foundation described some time ago by Robert Louis Stevenson:

The world is so full of a number of things,
I think we should all be as happy as kings.

Robert Louis Stevenson, "Happy Thought," A Child's Garden of Verses (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1895), 44; digital image, The RLS Website (http://www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/ : accessed 5 September 2012).  The virtual book is on Internet Archive.

Harold Henderson, "One Thousand and Counting," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 8 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Weekend Wonderings: What Would You Write About?

Suppose, just hypothetically, that you were tapped (or inspired) to write a blog post every few months on "The State of the Profession" of genealogy.

What would you write about? What stories or numbers would you seek out? Who would you interview? Would you focus on scholarship? education? advocacy? money? TV shows?

Or would you firmly turn away and not do it?



Harold Henderson, "Weekend Wonderings: What Would You Write About?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]