Saturday Serendipity (February 22, 2014)

Saturdays often allow a more leisurely approach to life than work days. I can more easily post links to some blog posts or other materials I have discovered during the week, or even to those discovered during a Saturday morning coffee and extended surfing of the blogosphere/internet.

Here are a few recommendations for inclusion on your reading list this week .  .  .  

1.  As Heather Rojo explains in her wonderfully colorful post at Nutfield Genealogy, today is "World Thinking Day." Have a look in case you have never heard of Thinking Day. Also stop by A to Zophar blog by Wendy Grant Walter and Life From The Roots by Barbara Poole to see their thoughts on Thinking Day and Girl Scouts.  To learn more about the history of World Thinking Day see http://www.worldthinkingday.org/en/about/History.  

     

2.  If you have ever held a camera and aspired to take at least good photographs -- and you love  photographs of the beauty created by Mother Nature (even or especially in black and white) -- then you know who Ansel Adams is. Barbara Poole is a student of photography and she not only knew of and appreciated Ansel Adams, she met him, got his autograph AND had him pose for her!  Read Barbara's story here at Life From The Roots blog.  

3.  An "acrostic" is a poem or word puzzle or other composition that uses specific letters in each line of the work to form a words or words.  It comes from the Greek words akron meaning "end" and stikhos meaning "row or line of verse." Last week The Vault brought us an example of a Valentine acrostic in poem form composed by Virginia Poe for her husband, Edgar Allan Poe.  See the poem here and learn more about acrostical Valentines at this Colonial Williamsburg website to which The Vault links.   

4.  If you have not seen the graphic explanation of the fascination that is genealogy as depicted in "Your Family: Past, Present, and Future", then you REALLY need to have a look. Those of us who are "into genealogy" have seen or written about the revelations and concepts so cleverly depicted at this post on Wait But Why, but many of our non-believing family members and friends have probably not. As Diane Richard at Upfront With NGS put it in featuring this post and blog, "Consider sharing it with your family, friends, neighbors, co-workers and others.  It just might spark some interest in them to learn more about their own family.  They might learn what we already know, every family has some really neat stories to tell!"  [Notice how I have now added Wait But Why to my list of "Interesting Links!"]

5.  Here is an amusing and illustrative post by Laura Mattingly of The Old Trunk In The Attic blog. Is it really daunting enough to drive one to tears when faced with the discovery of such very common ancestor names as "John and Mary Smith?" See how Laura tackles the challenge and what the result is.  

6.  Genealogist vs. Family Historian. James Tanner at Genealogy's Star blog presents a nice internal dialog with himself about the issue and concludes, "Now which am I? A genealogist or a family historian? I guess I will never know." This is a thoughtful read, but I conclude the best goal to strive for is to become a smooth amalgam of both.  They are not mutually exclusive by any means IMHO.

7.  Judy Russell's interesting post about the law on recipes and copyrighting is well worth a read at The Legal Genealogist since every family has those special recipes they want to share -- well, except for those super secret ones.  

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Copyright 2014, John D. Tew

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