very un-fun part here...tons of old files to merge and pics to wade through...organization of the hulk of material...turning all that old draft stuff into something that charts the journey and finding a good balance between rough and polished. it's taking a couple days.
Ayep, making progress little by little. The Quilt's pretty much just a foundation for doing the deeper research on microfilms and in collections.
I'm using the opportunity to re-fresh on all the genealogy basics which I learned about piecemeal over the years in between other studies. It always feels good to dive into a field of research and acquaint and re-famililiarize self with established landmarks like a particular worker in the field or the signposts indicating where the work's been done already. So one thing I am doing along the way on this trip is comparing Croom's Genealogist's Companion and Sourcebook to what's available online about fifteen years after her magnanimous work came out in print--for just twenty bucks! Can you imagine? Twenty bucks for a motherlode of how to, what worked, organizing disparate and far-flung, and probably a lifetime of compilation. I don't have twenty bucks so I was fortunate to rent this one from the public library. Speaking of which, in our town it really cramps the researcher that all the local history and genealogical stuff has been rounded up and put in the history museum. Oh man, can't win for trying!
Seems like, to me, massive fires which have blotted out entire chunks of evidence of our peoples should be enough of a reason to split up and duplicate research not round it up and limit access to it. Of course, legitimacy has thus far meant in culture deeming something "special" so, for instance not everybody can hand out marriage certificates, or, you can't get a driver's license at a car dealership. And yet, academically, much expansion of education and understanding has happened since the widening open of "the canon."
There is, there's metaphor in there for whatever this is that we are all going through as a society regarding standards. Some things are better because people turn away from forced canon in literature (for example) or when people widen open the prescribed canons. And some things mean lowering standards. In the fluctuations between what's typically called high and low culture is volatile standard. And this can create an immense pressure on an individual to keep up, stand firm, or otherwise relate.
And you thought us library types don't have relationships. I myself have a fierce love of the hunt and gathering. A great fondness for some works and a confounding dislike of others. And all my life I've been in relationship with the state of scholarship in America which sometimes merely whispers and sometimes screams and begs for people to entreat. Very often scholarship is the grounding rod between atmospheres of politics and governance, art and madness, etc. And usually it is where enough safety (through checks and balances, community, and focused solitude) can be forged for societies to make it through anything from apples to war.
I wouldn't feel right about loading up all of Croom's goodies onto mama's quilt but feel free to contact me if you need some assistance getting unstuck or if you want an update on where we need to look next. Where possible I'll be re-adding some of the correspondence and such that shows us who is working on what. Now that we don't need to take the whole damn thing down every time there are changes to work station here, we should make better progress. But I have too much other work to do to do much more than add a tidbit a day.
We need to post little blurbs about each of us contemporaries...consider sending me something so I don't make up anything stupid. Tay?!
Bit of a mish mosh at the start of anything. Should be in much better shape by Christmas. Above are some of the components in the West Virginia panel. Obviously we don't want to spend time on textile arts creating any false information so the simple rule is not to work on that part of the project unless we've done a thorough job on our research. Speaking of which we've caught a mistake we made in our research about Grandmother Nellie Lake Candy Belden that got out on a family sheet online. It's on our list of things to do by next Monday to make effort to correct the misinformation! We also caught some confusion about family tree on Find A Grave and we'll make an effort to remedy that as well. That had us pouring over more established sources of information today which we can now cite anywhere in the Quilt where we copied and/or repeated that information.
I have a hard time working with electronic information, like I get overwhelmed between reading virtual and not just copying and pasting but recording all the information on my written maps. Digitization can help us find stuff faster but it definitely also adds steps to the laborious old school work. I love doing it, not complaining, but en masse information hunting and gathering put together with any kind of production can be depressing. Personally, I have to get more in art-making mode to do the blog of the e-quilt. Like it's a different phase of project development...which is why big companies and organizations might call this type of project Research and Development. Whether we are creating paragraphs or business reports we move along step by step compiling and presenting. Each tidbit of research and presentation develops "the case" and/or "the cause."
Sometimes writers feel more stressed about factual writing and sometimes they feel more stressed about fiction writing. Either way the writer has to collect nuggets, polish each, and string together in some fashion.
