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Category: genealogy (Page 2 of 5)

How are you doing?

November 25, 2019 /

Chances are, most days you’re asked this question at least once if not dozens of times. The majority of the time, though, the questioner doesn’t really care about your response. This statement is simply another form of hello; unfortunately, since it is in the form of a query, the recipient feels compelled to respond.

Are you merely average?

The average, even expected, response to this question is to simply utter “good” or “o.k.” I say phooey on that! Buck the system! Be different! Stand out!

As a social experiment, you could reply with something like “I’m horrible!” or “I’m having a rotten day!” and test the sincerity of your inquisitor, but I say do the opposite: provide an over-the-top positive response.

Even if you’re not feeling splendiferous, saying that your are can be beneficial:

  • It can help you stand out in the eyes of your questioner, which can be important in work and social situations.
  • it can paint you as a generally positive or go-to type person in the minds of your associates–again, a good quality to be ascribed.
  • it can help improve your vocabulary as you look for new and interesting words to describe your effervescence, and
  • you might just start believing that you truly are exuberant if you say it enough times. (And who doesn’t want to be exuberant as much as possible?)

So, the next time someone asks you “how’re you doing?” try replying with one of these (with bonus points for three or more syllables):

  • awesome
  • bombastic
  • buoyant
  • canny
  • cheerful
  • competent
  • dynamite
  • excellent
  • excited
  • fabulous
  • fantastic
  • great
  • ineffable
  • jolly
  • jovial
  • jubilant
  • magnificent
  • phenomenal
  • resilient
  • rhapsodic
  • salubrious
  • sanguine
  • smashing
  • spectacular
  • stupendous
  • terrific
  • tremendous

Building resiliency in your children

March 18, 2019 /
Boy, that kid is resilient

Some time ago, I posted some thoughts on why a person should pursue genealogy as a hobby. Well, according to researchers, here’s another good reason: it helps build resiliency in your children!

Here’s a salient quote from the article:

Researchers speculated that children who know about their own family history have a stronger feeling of being part of something bigger than themselves. Children who knew family history felt part of a larger family.

Daily Herald, 23 February 2019

I wholeheartedly concur. If not you, then some recent or distant ancestor undoubtedly struggled against insurmountable odds and prevailed to give you and your family a fighting shot at success. I think knowing that struggle and sacrifice does build hope and promise in your children and bonds your family even more tightly.

So where do you start? The article suggested a few questions you can pose to your children:

  • Do you know where your grandparents grew up?
  • Do you know where your parents met?

Seems like a good start to me!

(Thanks to Dick Eastman for linking to the article.)

Scanning slides, Part 2

February 18, 2019 /
Believe it or not, you used to be able to walk right up to the White House

A while back, I wrote about some PowerShell tricks I use as I scan the thousands of slides my dad has amassed over the last five decades. I did leave one small trick out, though, that I wish to share now.

As I scan old photos, I do my best to document every detail I can about the picture: when it was taken, where, who are the people in the photo, etc. One of these days, I’ll figure out a more robust way to store these details, but for now, I write them to text files that I keep in the very folders of the images they describe.

When I first began genealogy back in the 1990s, a lot of the software I worked with professionally used INI configuration files in which a section would begin left-aligned in the file and all other lines for the section would be tab-indented underneath. This is the format I adopted back then and, for consistency sake, have continued with ever since:

Example of my current image documentation file

So, you might be asking yourself, “self, what does any of this have to do with PowerShell?” Well, as I scan a set of slides, I’ll house them in their own folder. Then, I’ll run PowerShell like the following to quickly generate a readme/documentation text file to describe the images:

# generate a readme file for the directory
$dir = "C:\my_path\slides\grp_007"
$desc_line1 = "Slide appears to be dated "
$desc_line2 = "Slide is number #.  Photographer was likely John Jones. Slide is labeled 'Kodachrome II Transparency'. Slide was part of a metal container labeled magazine number '2'. Handwritten label on slide case reads, "
gci $dir | where {$_.Extension.ToLower() -eq ".jpg"} | foreach{"{0}`r`n`t{1}`r`n`t{2}`r`n" -f $_.Name, $desc_line1, $desc_line2} | Out-File ("{0}\readme_grp007.txt" -f $dir)

This code will quickly scaffold out my documentation file and save me a lot of typing. Typically, each slide has some sort of handwritten label that I’ll also want to capture in the readme file, so I’ll still have to go through each slide and type out the label corresponding to the image, but most of the slides share many of the same properties and being able to capture all those common properties at once is a great time saver.

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