Granfalloon

For most of my life I’ve considered myself a little obsessive, in the sense that I have a tendency to get really deep into things that interest me. The first example that comes to mind is my favorite band, Modest Mouse. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve loved them since I was fourteen when I first heard the songs “Float On” and “The Ocean Breathes Salty” on the radio. After years of listening to my favorite songs repeatedly and seeing the band live about seven times (I’ve almost lost count), I still listen to their music regularly and keep up with their new album releases which, happily for me, still occur every five years or so. Oh, and I totally lost my cool and embarrassed myself when I met the lead singer, but that’s a different story. While Modest Mouse is definitely the longest-lasting obsession of mine, a number of other seemingly random interests have had strong impacts on my life, even if the obsession period itself was rather short. I probably wouldn’t be writing this right now ...

Are you an all-or-nothing type of person? Or are you more like me: a something-is-better-than-nothing type of person? I think I first embraced the SIBTN idea a few years ago, when I forewent the idea that every time I went for a run, I had to run at least three miles otherwise the run was useless. I traded the three-miles-or-nothing mentality for a more laid-back approach, in which I accepted that as long as I got outside and ran some distance–even if it was just around the block–this was still better than staying inside on my tokus. The bonus part of this is that probably 99% of the time, I’d go out with the intention of only running for ten minutes but end up feeling so good that I’d continue for at least another thirty. I also feel less anxious about getting out the door in the first place, because I don’t have to worry about feeling like a failure if I don’t hit my specific goal. It’s about time I take my own advice into the world of writing. I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that I d...

As mentioned in the last post, genealogical research often requires asking living relatives to provide historical narratives and fill gaps in ancestral data. However, doing so can be harder than it sounds. Some people don’t have any living relatives, and sometimes living relatives are not easy to contact. Even if the relatives are both living and easy to contact, they are not always easy to communicate with. I’m going to take a brief pause in my genealogical research so I can tell you about my mom. While this is a vehicle of sorts for the “real” genealogical story I’ve been constructing, I think more importantly my mom deserves her own post separate from everything else I’ve been doing here. This will serve as a way to prove my above-mentioned point, as well as a much-needed written account of some of the more personal aspects of my mom’s life that have, up until now, lived only inside her own head. The details below have all been told to me over the years by my mom. So here goes: My ...

Over the last month of working on my genealogical research, I’ve learned that names and spelling in various records are often inconsistent. This can make determining the “correct” way to spell someone’s name a bit tricky. Spelling was not taken as seriously 100 years ago as it is now, and literacy rates were lower than they are today. I remember reading somewhere that spelling a name phonetically was often more important than spelling it “correctly,” because for people with differing reading abilities, being able to pronounce the name was more important than being able to write it.  To make a genealogist’s work even harder, sometimes handwriting on old documents is hard to read, and scanned images might be blurry. These challenges can cause transcription errors when a document is digitized, as seen in this example from Ancestry.com: Source: AncestryInstitution.com, accessed from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Of course I know that my paternal grandmother went by the name Sa...

Picking up where I left off in part one , I’ll begin this post with two more pieces of advice that I’ve found in genealogical literature: Start with yourself and work backward Research one ancestor at a time I wanted to start working on my mom’s side of the family because I don’t feel as connected to her side as I do to my dad’s. Among myriad other reasons (including family dramas that I won’t go into), I think this is in part because I was very young when both my grandparents on my mom’s side passed away, and once that occurred we just didn’t spend much time with other relatives from that side. I’d like to learn more about my mom’s parents and hopefully build a stronger connection to them. I decided to start with my mom’s father, Francis T. Martin. One of the few things I remember about him, besides that his friends and family called him “Sparky,” is that he was a veteran of World War II. I thought it would be interesting to dig into some military records, but these can be tricky to f...

Recently I was asked what part of Italy my ancestors (on my dad’s side) were from, and I was incredibly embarrassed to say that I didn't know. After asking my dad, I learned that my ancestors hail from Naples and Sicily. However, I still wasn’t particularly interested in knowing more; I guess I just wasn’t fully convinced that knowing about the origins of my family would have any impact on my life today. Honestly, it’s difficult to explain what I thought about my family history because for so long I hadn't thought much about it at all. Now that I work in an environment that is heavily involved in genealogical research, I find myself fascinated by people who spend hours collecting not just general knowledge about their ancestors, but actual first-hand accounts and details from primary sources. My interest has been piqued, and I've decided to take my own genealogical journey. When I got started I realized that I really knew nothing about genealogical research and wasn’t sure ...

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