02:52 - 18.02.08
Digging In
I don't have a lot to say tonight dear diary. Another day working away on the family tree means there are now nearly 100 family members captured for posterity. I was fortunate enough to find birth certificates for several of my grandfather's - my Mom's Dad - family, although I can't view all the details, since one has to pay for that. There was enough information to verify that I have the correct data and that I am on the right path. What was frustrating was searching for my Mom's Mom's data. She had a very unusual middle name that should make it easy to search. But first up the records kept coming up for women who would have been 70 years old by the time my grandmother was born. My grandmother was born in the early 1900's, but it was as though the software "saw" the number 9 as the number 8. The only female with the exact match to my grandmother was listed on the voter's registration lists in California. Obviously her namesake was a conscientious citizen anyway. Another quirk in the software is that it links the grandmother's birth date to her grandchildren as though she were their mother. The error message that constantly came up was that the child's birthday that I was entering had to be incorrect, because the woman would have been too old to have conceived by that date. That problem required one to over-ride the system to hard enter the data. There is also no option for dealing with adoptions - at least I haven't found one yet. One has to have a "birth" mother, before one can enter someone in at the correct position for the family grouping. I think I reviewed well over 1000 records with respect to the search for my grandmother's documents - the dates on them making it very easy to scan those records quickly. Added in to the birth date glitch, the time spent online was considerably more than I had originally planned.
I also spent a lot of time using the bookshare application on my Facebook account. When one searches a book title, several versions often appear. What is disturbing is that some of the covers have been sensationalized to sell or attract attention now, even though when I read them - sometimes decades ago - there was no such manipulation about the contents of the tome. For example, the book "Caravans", by James Michener, now has words added about it being about Afghanistan implying a current events theme. That isn't the focus of the story, which was a good enough read without any extra sensationalism. Misleading. Same with the book "Holy Terror", the analysis of how special interest groups, including politicos, use words and psychological tricks to manipulate one's perception of issues and events. My guess is that the extra burbling will turn off more potential readers than otherwise. It also really cheapens the important work and thought that the authors put into it. Some of the time when I search a book title I can't find the version that I read, such as the volume of Wordsworth poems that was handed down to me from my Mom's parents. Also, especially with non-English titles, the translation can be significantly different from one version to the next. Sometimes too it has been so long since I read a particular book that I really can't recall the cover. I don't judge, or select, books to read by their covers, you see. The other concern i have with the application that there is a section that asks if one is willing to lend out their books. Just in terms of personal safety I don't think that is a good idea. Besides is one expected to ship a book to another city or country upon request? Too many logistical and safety concerns for me.
I did have a brief conversation today with the one nephew for whom I purchased all those second hand books for his Christmas gift. He says he has eight of them partly read, because that way he is always reading one that really interests him. He says the one he is enjoying the most is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig. That is one of those books that forever changes the way one sees and experiences reality, if you give the ideas presented any consideration at all.
Anyway the cats have been following me everywhere for the past hour trying to herd me to bed, so to bed I must go - I guess. Good night dear diary.
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