Streams of Conciousness

The focus on this site is managing your finances and saving money. Lots of plain sense and good ideas.

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/

So one of the things that I’ve started looking into is a decent way of storing and sharing family histories. I’m less interested in the dates and sources, although I do agree that those are important. I don’t think nearly enough emphasis has been placed on learning the histories and stories of our ancestors.

A couple quick examples:

1. I really don’t need a census to tell me that I have a great-grandfather. I am very certain that at one point he did exist. So what? Why do I care? Why should I care? Well, when I heard the story about how he and his father worked together for a time, something inside me resonated with that. It did so enough that when I got a chance to work with my dad professionally I jumped at the chance. I even left a solid job for one that was rather shaky (the company did go under a couple years later). But I not only love and respect my father; he is one of my best friends, and I wanted to have the same experience my great-grandfather had. Virtually everyone I talked to warned me about the dangers of working with family–you can really ruin your relationship that way, etc. But you know what? It was awesome! I loved it–it was a wonderful experience. I’m sorry it didn’t last longer.
2. Let’s say that you ask me how my day was, and I respond like this: “I woke up at 4:00 am, ate a very small breakfast. Lunch was at 12:35 pm, dinner at 6:30. I went to bed at 11:00 pm.” What have you learned about me? I’ve given you some facts, but without context it means nothing to anyone. It proves I was alive, but doesn’t show anything beyond that. In fact, that particular answer is misleading; as it implies that I get up extremely early–I did get up extremely early that day, but that was very much the exception. I’m actually known for sleeping in somewhat. You don’t know if that was a good day or a bad day, or whether it was remarkable in any way. The day I just described was June 11, 2011, when I ran the Utah Valley Marathon with two of my sisters. It was extremely hard, due to lack of both sleep and training, but still a very worthwhile (and remarkable) experience. Will my children and their children be affected in some way because they learn that I enjoyed running long distances? Probably more so than just if they know that I existed.

Now, I’ve heard my parents tell a couple remarkable stories about our ancestors, and I want to know more. I want to record those and share them. That’s where this gets a little tricky. The traditional genealogy programs out there focus very much on dates and sources–proving that this person was your ancestor. That is valuable and important. To a Mormon like myself, it’s even important for our salvation. But I believe that is only half of the equation. The Bible talks of the hearts of the children turning to their fathers. For myself I have experienced this as I have learned about them–what kind of people they were and the stories of their lives.

I want a program where the focus is on sharing stories. I want it to be collaborative. I want it to be sharable. I want it to be simple. Family History is done largely by people who are unfamiliar with computers, and even I get confused at all the buttons, options, and choices presented to me on some of the programs I’ve seen. Why is it so complex? Why is it that the only place to put histories is in the notes? And why, oh why is it that I can only upload pictures and sounds? Why not RTF documents, PDFs, videos, etc, or even text documents? Histories do not belong in the notes section. Notes belong in the notes section. Thankfully the genealogy programs seem to be improving somewhat, but the focus is still on proof and dates much more than stories and histories.

Personally, when I see a quick summary view of an ancestor, what I would like to see is:

• Their picture, if available
• birth and death (years ONLY)
• A one or two sentence summary about the person (“Cattle thief. Good with kids”).

The detailed view of the individual would have the picture, full birth and death dates and summary at the top. The main section would be their full biography. Other data (birth place, ordinances, etc). would be in an info box to the side. Sources would be at the bottom. Something along those lines.

I thought a wiki-based approach would be a good way to do what I consider to be a family history program as opposed to a genealogy program. It is collaborative, it is online, so it’s sharable. The trouble is that without some serious work, the average wiki is too complex. We don’t want the users to have to learn wikitext. They need a rich text editor. They need a simple way to attach families, individuals, pictures, movies, etc.–the process would be more like writing a blog than using PAF.

I just recently installed a wiki with the intent to try and grow it into something useful, but a friend pointed me to a few sites that are doing this kind of thing, and I’m looking into those as well as trying to do further research on additional existing functionality. So far the ones that are the most interesting to me are werelate.org and familypedia.org, although there is a lot more research to do.

I’m especially intrigued by the idea of combining family history information (including the dates and places that I’ve been ranting about) with the idea of the semantic web, making that information (and the associated stories and histories) easier to share not just by pointing people to your specific site, but allowing other sites and programs to easily find, interpret, understand, and re-share that same information.

For the short term, I’m going to research the existing products more, and decide whether to continue trying to build my own or to use an existing program (and/or assist in developing it). Part of me wants to build my own, of course, but that would be a very large undertaking, and I don’t have very much time to spare.

Do you have any family history programs you would recommend? How do you share your family stories?

So baby #3 arrived the other day. I’m still surprised at how small they are (Mommy is very glad they aren’t any bigger, thank you very much…).

She is a beautiful baby, and had her eyes open and looking around at everyone. Other than a very long labor, everything went pretty well (and long labors are par for the course, unfortunately…).

Here’s my private post with lots more pictures: http://jergal.blogspot.com/2011/06/evelyn-joy-robertson.html

http://jergal.blogspot.com/2011/05/cedar-city-trip.html

An excellent post about Proposition 8 – particularly on the discussion about Freedom of Religion vs. Freedom of Worship.

http://thoserobertsons.blogspot.com/2010/08/is-sexual-freedom-more-important-than.html

So I’m going to brag a little. I’ve been wanting to re-do our rather dilapidated swingset, but we don’t currently have the money to do all the neat stuff that I want to do. So instead of that, I built a toddler size playhouse out of our snowball bush.

The bush is huge, so it already had a decent amount of space underneath it. I took one afternoon and cleared out the (mostly) deadwood from underneath the bush and ended up with a fairly decent space.

After that the main thing it needed was a door.

Here’s the inside:

And a few more pics for fun:

Yesterday my wife and I decided on the spur of the moment to go see “How To Train Your Dragon” Since it was spur of the moment, our babysitting options were short. We figured it was a kid’s movie, so we could go ahead and take the kids.

…That might have been a mistake. Our toddler daughter loved seeing the dragons flying, but got bored about halfway through the movie. Meanwhile our baby son got hungry, so we had to buy some gummy bears to feed him throughout the movie (yes, we did give him real sustenance afterward).

Having said that, the movie was awesome. I mean, awesome! It was like taking my childhood daydreams and making a movie from them!

It was also a great bonding moment for my boy and I–at the end of the movie I discovered that both of us were covered in sticky, half-chewed gummy bears.

http://jergal.blogspot.com/2010/04/undoing-dishes.html

The other day when I got home from work, I was changing into some casual clothes, and my toddler daughter asked me what I was doing, “I’m changing my clothes”

…

“Daddy pooped his panties!”

So a couple days ago I was putting my daughter in bed for her nap when she looks up at me and says, “Cut me, daddy!”

?… So of course I try to think of words that sound similar to “cut” that might make sense…

“What?”

“Cut me.”

“Did you mean Talk?”

“No. Cut me!”

“…Um, I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Cut me! Like this,” whereupon she puts both hands under her armpits, then her sides, then her legs.

“Are you sure you mean ‘cut’?”

“Yes!”

I spent about five minutes trying to figure out what she meant and getting worried that Mommy was right when she said our girl was starting to understand violence. I had her repeat it several times, tried repeating other words back; she also demonstrated what she meant a couple more times as well.

Finally Mommy came and saved the day–”She means tuck.”

Thank heavens.