Tag: book

52W Mark III – Week 51: Good Deeds

For the most part, the genealogical community is a wonderfully supportive and delightful group of people. At our best, we’re collaborative, sharing, thoughtful, insightful, and keen to help each other reach our genealogical goals. I’ve benefitted a lot from other genealogists and I hope I’ve been able to contribute my fair share.

While I can think of many examples, perhaps the greatest genealogical good deed was the kindness of an unexpected gift from the late Lorine McGinnis Schulze of Olive Tree Genealogy. (While Lorine passed away in 2022, her website and blog are still online.)

When I was in elementary school, I got an amazing genealogy book for kids through Scholastic book orders, called Digging for My Roots. It is full of charts, tables, and other worksheets for you to fill in as you learn about your family history. It’s been out of print for decades, but I still have my copy.

My copy of Digging for My Roots, which I’ve had since I was a kid.

Our eldest son developed an interest in genealogy when he was seve years old – about a year or two younger than I was when I started. I even bought him a membership in the British Columbia Genealogical Society for his tenth birthday. It hasn’t a passing fancy, either. He’s now almost in his mid-teens and he is still deeply interested and involved.

When he became interested in genealogy, I started looking for kid-appropriate genealogy books for him. However, none of the currently published books I could find were anywhere near as good as Digging for My Roots. Some were okay, but many were subpar.

Back in the good old days, before it was sold and turned into a dumpster fire, Lorine posted a question on Twitter, asking the genealogical community what inspired us to take up our search for our ancestors. In my response, I mentioned the book in passing and how I would love to have a copy for my son.

A few months later, I received a direct message from Lorine. It turns out that after seeing my Tweet, on her own volition she searched out a copy of the book, and found one. She bought it and wanted to send it to me to give to my son.

The amazing thing was that the book was pristine. None of the worksheets had been filled in. Forty-plus years out of print, and not a single item filled in. I was gobsmacked. Not only that, but Lorine absolutely refused to let me pay for the book. She wouldn’t even let me pay for the shipping.

Lorine did not have to do any of that for us. I’m also certain that she had so much on her plate that there was no need to put in the time it must have taken to do this for us. I’m sure I must have interacted with her with some “likes” and retweets, but otherwise she did not know me at all and I only knew her through her website and social media presence. I cannot think of any reason for her to have done this for an otherwise complete stranger other than the kindness of her heart.

Thanks to Lorine’s good deed, my son and I both have copies of Digging For My Roots!

52W Mark III – Week 45: Colourful

I’ve written a fair amount about my Aunt Diana (Helen Diana Burgess 1951 – 1999), but usually I’ve focused on her scientific side. However, I’ve always considered her a true Renaissance Woman, because the arts were just as important to her. It’s why her scientific pursuits lead her into the colourful world of art conservation.

According to the obituary published in the Canadian Conservation Institute Newsletter in November 1999,

Helen loved paper and textiles, flowers, beautiful ceramics and glass, and cats. She was often teased by her friends for picking flowers wherever she could find them, including, in one instance, the Faculty Club garden at Queen’s. Helen enjoyed painting flowers and donated several of her watercolours to the Lupus Society.

Diana took me to the first movie I ever saw in a cinema, Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Going to that movie was also the first time I rode a city bus. She also had some marvelous record albums, which included the original edition of Jesus Christ Superstar. I remember listening to it over and over again while reading all of my uncle’s comic books whenever we visited my grandparents.

This is the copy my Aunt Diana gave me, which my sons now have.

Books were often a welcome gift from her, often titles I had never heard of but came to love. Diana had a huge library of fiction and non-fiction books. In particular, she loved detective novels. The best book she gave me was from the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, Mystery of the Flaming Footprints. The books are about three boy detectives, which were everything boring old Hardy Boys books were not. I went on to buy many more from the series. I’ve passed them all on to my sons, who have read them all several times over.

When I was in undergrad, Diana introduced me to L.R. Wright and her first novel, The Suspect. That book quite blew my mind – a detective novel not only set in Canada rather than the US or UK. Moreover, it wasn’t someplace like Toronto, rather, it was set in the small town of Sechelt, only a short drive away from where live. It’s now been turned into a TV series, Murder in a Small Town.

Diana took me on tours of art galleries, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Vancouver Art Gallery. It was wonderful having someone so knowledgeable about art as my guide. Diana loved to paint as well. When I was 10, she gave me my first set of oil paints, along with a small canvas, brushes, turpentine, and linseed oil. It didn’t take long for me to accidentally spill some on the gold shag carpet in our living room. Oops. At least it was purple, which pairs well with gold.

She mostly painted still life, often in vibrant or bright colours, although sometimes she used a more muted palate. My mother has a few of her works, one of which now hangs in her living room.

52W Mark III – Week 44: Challenging

The prompt this week for the 52 Ancestors Challenge is “Challenging”. You know what is challenging? The 52 Ancestors Challenge, that’s what!!

Starting the 52 Ancestors Challenge was hard:

Three years in a row, I signed up for Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks”. The first two times, that was as far as I got. Hopefully, third time’s the charm. Hence this blog, only a quarter century behind the times.

As I later described it:

I originally signed up for the 52 Ancestors Challenge for 2020, but did nothing afterwards. I signed up again for 2021, for which I also did nothing.

Somehow third time was the charm. I know there was something that spurred me on to actually do something for the 2022 challenge, but now for the life of me I can’t recall what that was!

Halfway through my first year actually participating in the Challenge, I wrote:

Holy smokes, we’re now halfway through the year. Moreover, with 26 installments, we’re halfway through this year’s 52 Ancestors Challenge! With that, I’ve managed to consistently blog for six months. While it has been a bit of a slog the last few weeks, I’m so pleased I’ve stuck with it and made it this far!

I persevered and successfully completed the year. Building on that success, I signed up for 2023 edition of the Challenge. Once again, I completed all 52 weeks. Not only that, but I turned my first year’s set of posts in to a book that I printed and handed out as Christmas and Hannukah gifts!

Buoyed by that success, I re-upped a third time, for the 2024 edition of the Challenge. With eight weeks to go, I’m confident I’ll successfully complete all 52 weeks.

However, I have to be honest. The Challenge is becoming more challenging. I’ve picked the low hanging fruit several times now. It’s getting harder and harder to write about things I haven’t already covered before – sometimes more than once. Many times this year I thought I had come up with something entirely new, only to discover partway through or near completion that I had already written about the same thing. This year seems to have a few reruns, as I really did not want to start over. In fact, just discovered that I’ve already sort of covered the topic of the challenge of participating in the Challenge.

As a result, for the last month or so I haven’t produced anything for the current week before the next prompt is posted. (Although, ironically, the one week I was ahead of the prompt, it was delayed!) I know what Amy would say about that, but I’d still enjoy it more if I could keep more current.

As I’ve said before, the primary purpose of undertaking this blog was to get myself to write more about my family history after decades of researching and compiling information. Even though this year has been more challenging, I am still achieving that goal and continue to find value in participating.

That said, I don’t think I have it in me to do another full year of the Challenge, at least not in the way I’ve participated for nearly three years. However, I will need to think of something that is still regular and structured; without it, I can see a future where posts become fewer and farther apart in time, until it just peters out. Fortunately, Amy recently posted (I can’t remember if it was in her Facebook group, Generations Cafe, or in her emails) that she was planning something new or different for 2025. I can’t wait to see what that might be!

In the meantime, having completed a second full year of posts, I once again created a family history book based upon the compiled collection of entries for 2023! I hadn’t planned on another print edition, but as I started working on the electronic version I began to feel the need to be able to hold it and read it the old fashioned way. So here it is, A Book of Ancest0rs – Mark II!!

52W Mark II – Week 52: Me, Myself, and I

After posting last week’s entry, in which I wrote about being my own cousin, I realized that it very well could have fit in with this week’s theme of “Me, Myself, and I”. However, to mark the last (!?!) week of Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors Challenge for 2023, the thing I will share about myself is how I have used the challenge to the fullest.

I wrote a family history book!

I originally signed up for the 52 Ancestors Challenge for 2020, but did nothing afterwards. I signed up again for 2021, for which I also did nothing.

Somehow third time was the charm. I know there was something that spurred me on to actually do something for the 2022 challenge, but now for the life of me I can’t recall what that was!

For years I had vaguely pondered a genealogy blog, but really couldn’t think of a niche that wasn’t already being addressed by dozens of other genealogy blogs. However, the 52 Ancestors Challenge was the catalyst to creativity that I needed. So a quarter century after blogging was cool, I created this blog as a means of participating in the challenge.

At the same time, I set up a second Twitter (I refuse to use the “new” name) account that would only be used for genealogy, also named Deck of Ancestors. I’ve since created namesake accounts on Mastodon, the now defunct Pebble, Mastodon, and Bluesky. I’ve largely abandoned Mastodon. I’m active on Bluesky, but it doesn’t seem to be gaining the traction I thought it had when I first joined.

It was hard at times, but I was successful in posting something for all 52 weeks of the challenge. With this post, I’ll be successful for a second year in a row. The second year was more difficult. It felt harder to come up with something I hadn’t written about before and some of the weekly prompts were not easy for me. Nevertheless, I persevered! I’ve signed up for the challenge again for 2024. Looking at the prompts, it looks like it will be another difficult year, but I will try to rise to the challenge.

However, what I’ve always wanted to do is create some sort of family history book. However, I was reluctant to churn out one of those dry tomes that’s just a bunch of pedigree charts and a BMD narrative. I’ve started and stopped all sorts of drafts and have the works in progress still sitting in a folder on my computer.

My real first genealogy book!

Moreover, like a lot of family historians, I had lots of ideas for genealogy-related Christmas presents, but kept putting it off until it was too close to the holiday to get it done.

Thanks to the 52 Ancestors challenge, I inadvertently hit upon what I thought was a winning solution – the blog posts were essentially a book! I had the foresight to start working on this project in the summer, which began with reformatting the blog entries into a book format. The other problem was figuring out how to print it.

Luckily, this year I discovered Lulu, an online self-publishing site. I had used others before, but none worked for this project. In September I ordered a test copy. It passed muster, so I ordered enough copies for my Christmas gift giving – my parents, our kids, my siblings, and my nibblings, plus copies for the Library and Archives Canada. (It may be nerdy, but I was really excited to get an ISBN for the project!)

A Stack of Ancestors!

So here it is, my family history book, A Deck of Ancestors, consisting of my 52 posts for the first year I participated in the 52 Ancestors Challenge. One of my sisters and her kids opened theirs early, as they went overseas for the holidays. I just made it a Hanukkah gift instead. The reviews were great. On Christmas Eve, my sister-in-law sent me photos of my father reading the copy I gave my parents. Seeing that was really special. While my father used to be a voracious reader, he doesn’t really read much anymore since his vision has deteriorated terribly over recent years. What I was most excited for was to see our kids open their copy. I was happy to come downstairs on Boxing Day morning to see our eldest engrossed in his.

In addition to the print version, I created an expanded digital edition (with its own unique ISBN, of course), which I sent to everyone after they opened their print copy. Among other things, I added an Ahnentafel, a 17-generation pedigree chart, and a full index. (I hate non-fiction books without an index!) It would have been extremely expensive to include all that in a print version. Plus, the digital version has all the hyperlinks, which are pretty hard to click in a print edition!

So thank you Amy Johnson Crow for creating the 52 Ancestors Challenge and helping me fill the one gap in my years of genealogy practice – writing!