A big, tedious, but way useful genealogy project

While she was in Maryland last week, L wheedled from her grandmother a copy of a family genealogy written by her great-grandfather for her father in 1945.  The book is a bound typescript of three hundred and some pages, with extensive handwritten annotations by her grandmother and father.  L got hold of it by promising to scan it and then return the original—the scanning part to be done by me, since (1) I’m the one besides Tink who’s interested in genealogy, and (2) I’m the household geek with the knowledge to make the scanner work properly.

However, the scanning itself is proving very boring, as the flatbed scanner has a slow cycle time, and its only after that I can start to clean up the computer’s copy.  Fortunately, TextBridge is making pretty easy work of recognizing the typewriting, so I don’t have to proof it letter by letter.

Tink warned me the book cannot be used without reservation or fact-checking, because Pop Harry was prone to fudge dates when babies came too soon after weddings.  He also had a sappy, romantic writing style that’s a trial to wade through; he says he was trying to making his book more interesting for a boy of my father-in-law’s age (about ten) than a standard birth-and-death chronicle would be, but he goes overboard and indulges in all manner of fancies that have nothing to do with genealogy and are pretty damn speculative as literature, in my estimation.

So far I’ve managed fifty pages of the book, which boils down to about twenty pages of Word document.  Maybe I’ll be able to finish in a months time and have the book on its way back to Tink.  I half-suspect I may end up with it again when she dies, because I like to think she’ll send it somewhere it might be cared for.

Zeus took his chariot to Joe’s Garage.  Fnord.