I don’t know why I first got behind on 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks this year. Maybe one week, I had to work a lot of overtime or something else kept me away from the computer. In the past, if I got behind, I started where I left off and I caught up by posting twice in one week. Or three times. This year, though, while I made some efforts to catch up, eventually, I just got too far behind.
The creator of #52Ancestors plainly says, don’t worry about skipping a week. Just pick up where you left off. Or pick and choose which weeks’ prompts you write about. I tried that, too. I tried jumping ahead and writing to the current prompt, but I felt guilty that I skipped posts.
I need to start fresh, which will probably be in a few weeks, when January 1st rolls around.
In the meantime, I have some projects. I’m looking at Twitter alternatives, and now have profiles on Post.news and Mastodon. At least a couple hundred genealogists have embraced Mastodon, so I expect to use that for family history-related posting, networking, and research troubleshooting. The #genealogy community online is generally amazing and interesting.
Post is a little more straightforward to use, and I expect that once it’s up to speed, that’s where I’ll see and share more content in other areas of interest, from current events and entertainment news, to nerdisms and cute animal pics.
My genealogy goals remain similar:
Advance my family tree accurately using documents and DNA. I just completed the Intermediate Foundations program at SLIG, and I need to apply what I’ve learned to break through my brick walls.
Pursue more advanced genealogy education. There are a couple of other DNA-related courses I’d like to take, depending on financial considerations. Medical bills and, more recently, a home plumbing project and a couple of car repairs, have cut into our fun money.
Preserve more recent family history. Mom just paid the bill for 1,400 slides and several old home movies to be digitized. Now I need to add metadata and find ways to share them with relatives – by email, uploading to FamilySearch, duplicating onto thumb drives and passing them out.
The photo on the left is one of those slides. Cleve Pittman and his sister Mollie Stevens were photographed in Muscogee, Escambia County, Florida. That’s all the information that I got from the brief handwritten note on the frame of the slide. The siblings were born in Baldwin County, Alabama, and after their father’s death, the family moved to Muscogee. That’s where my grandmother Willie Stevens was born and grew up. But where in Muscogee is this? Are they revisiting their old homestead, now overgrown? Is this the site of the Muscogee cemetery, which has now been somewhat preserved, but many of the markers are gone? No one is alive who was there the day this photo was taken. Since it was stored away in a slide carousel, it’s been decades since anyone has even looked at it.
This is my mission – to bring these photos to the light of the day and make connections with cousins who will be pleased to be able to put a face to the names in the family tree.
Rhyme Schemes and Daydreams 