Much of our
perspective as we do genealogy and family history research is to focus on the
people – while making note of details on where, when and what. This isn’t always sufficient to fully capture
the information to be found in the records of events identified in our
research. After all, our family trees
don’t show the “FAN club” we may have identified.
I was reminded of
this when I read a post last month by Tony Proctor titled Eventful Genealogy.
As he says ...
The Event is one of the most
undervalued entities in a family-history (or any history) collection. Excessive
emphasis is usually placed on the Person entity, and virtually none at all on
the Place entity. Read how the Event is crucial to binding our information to
create a coherent description of the past.
Because of this
issue, I frequently create matrices so that I can pull out information from
events that extend across often several family lines which are sometimes related
via marriage or birth and sometimes just related via geography, business
connections, or otherwise.
We need to be “open”
to exploring different ways of examining/presenting the information we acquire.
Though we are often challenged just to
find data and information about our ancestors, their lives and the historical
context in which they lived, we can also be greatly challenged to exhaustively
and properly analyze the data. Understanding
the events in our ancestors’ lives and the context of those events
historically, might significantly influence our interpretation of found
information.
After all, though
people may create history, historic events often shape how they respond. History doesn’t happen without people.
Has switching your perspective to events vs people resulted
in a eureka moment for your research?
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