Lost in the Past

Lost in the Past

I have been utterly uninspired to blog lately. I mean, obviously, I haven't been here. Want to know why? Because I have been obsessively researching genealogy. Not for any particular reason. I'm just IN LOVE with all these names, all these people....all of whom are dead. It's weird and a bit morbid I know.

Let me tell you a little something about me. I was AWESOME at being a graduate student. I was a crap psychologist and feel a twinge of guilt every time I write an enormous student loan check for a degree I'm not even using. I don't think it was being a psychologist I enjoyed. It was being a student that I loved. And I was so good at it! I still am.

Genealogy research is very similar to the kind of research I did in graduate school. There's a puzzle and you dig around putting the pieces together until it makes sense. Human behavior is a puzzle. A big one. Way more than the 1,000 piece puzzles that it takes your whole family six weeks to put together. Human behavior is a mental puzzle. The pieces are theories, data, research articles. The process of putting the puzzle together is complicated, messy, and unending.

Genealogy research is also a puzzle. You have all these names and a few sources of information. Using those sources of information, you put a story together. A story of a family. A story of a person. It's frustrating because some of those questions will just never be answered. It's a lot like psychology.

I originally dabbled in genealogy because I wanted to know about my father's family. Someone in my mother's family put together a rather extensive family tree going back to our original Scots-Irish Colonial ancestors so I knew a lot about them and where they came from. Scotland, by way of Ireland, with the original ancestor arriving here to Pennsylvania sometime between 1723 when he was born in Donegal, Ireland and 1747 when his son was born in the colonies -- FYI.

I don't know anything about my father's side, though. My older brother has some photos from the turn of the last century with names penciled on the back but we're not sure who they are exactly. My father said he thought they were from England but he wasn't sure. Well, it turns out he was right. My Whitley ancestors came to the colonies from England in the mid-1600's. I doubt it was religious freedom they came for. I bet it was to make a buck, knowing that side of the family.

So anyway, thanks to hours of pointless genealogical research I am now armed with hundreds of AWESOME baby names! It almost makes me wish I could have another baby just so I could name it Zebulon or Felix or Etoile or Highly Anne. I even had a male relative named Pleasant.

Wasn't there someone in New York with a baby-naming consultant business? I could totally do that.

Next Post: Parenting, Puritan Style!

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