IT WAS NEW SOFTWARE
Sat., March 6, 11:57 AM
A few months ago, I wrote about genealogy and how U.D. and I met some different relatives who were working on family trees. It brought me back to a piece I started to write some time before, when the subject was the same and I — with my relational database mind — remembered a new software. That is, it was new to me back then.
Whenever I have encountered a new software, I try to use it for something familiar, in order to get used to the way the application works. A new word processor? I would do — redo, actually — my résumé.
[I eventually designed my résumé into a booklet form. In retrospect, I imagine it was often overlooked because it was not conventional. That, I suppose, works for me. Any employer who can’t appreciate my creative ability — or at least examine it — is not someone for whom I wish to work.]
In the years when my company was developing the Theory of Constraints©, they bought Metadesign®, a flowchart application. We could use it to chart one’s train of logic. For example, a short if-then statement might be:
If I throw a ball into the air —> then it will fall down again.
I would, in time, get so good at using Metadesign that I taught it to new staff members, but for starters, I began putting together my family tree. I had been trying to explain to the kids about first cousins and second cousins and first cousins-once removed. It is a little confusing in my family, as I am sure I have explained before, because my dad was the youngest in his family and my mother almost eldest in hers. Dad had nieces and nephews who were about my mother’s age. So I had first cousins whose children seemed to be my generation. (Those are first cousins once removed.) And if it was bewildering for me, it was compounded for my kids.
One of the lovely things about Metadesign (or any other flowchart, I guess) was that you can put selected objects into the same level. That meant I could put each generation in its own line, and you could see why they were first cousins or second cousins or, so help me, first cousins-three time removed. I pulled up the old sheets recently for my brother’s grandchildren and realized I need to make some new ones. A generation has passed, and offspring are falling off the edges of the chart, which means I need to make new pages showing what is relevant to them.
One of my aunts told me several things about my grandparents’ generation, including information about those who had not come to North America. Some are now in South Africa. Some died in the Holocaust. At least I have some names there. Unfortunately, I never got to enter what I had taken down in shorthand, because my computer died at that time. The paper might be somewhere in the house, but I doubt it. That aunt, unfortunately, no longer recognizes her own children.
I do not have the names of my father’s cousins who fled first to the Netherlands and later to Israel. The probability of my ever tracing them is very slight.
This much I can tell you, however. The popular online genealogy sites have been absolutely useless to me. My grandparents were in the United States a hundred years ago, and the only mention of them in ancestry.com is what we entered ourselves. The public library where I worked so long ago used to have a local genealogy section, but (1) I can no longer jump into the car and drive there, and (2) it might be useless anyway. I can’t imagine that they saved the city directories from the 1920’s. The fire at City Hall, sometime in the 1940’s, I think, destroyed such vital records as my dad’s birth certificate. There are some things we are not destined to know. At least, not yet.
