Bringing an Idea into Focus
Anyone who read the previous blog may recall that it was a place for me to talk/write out what I was thinking and doing in a way to help me (and maybe others) work through specific research problems, or just to point to things that I thought may be important. There wasn’t much more of a theme at that time. It was simply the blog of a genealogist in training. A place for me to share what I was learning.
Since then, I started taking on a diverse range of cases that offered me a variety of challenges. I loved taking on cases that people described as their “brick wall” and working on figuring out a solution to the problem. As much fun as those brick wall cases were though, they tended to be problems following the male line in a family and I always found myself wondering about the females. Discovering the stories of related females was rarely a primary goal for the clients, which left me with a lot of questions of my own. If a potential sister was identified with her husband, I always wondered what happened to her? What was her story? When a father was identified for the subject, I always thought about the mother. What was her maiden name? How can I find it?
These questions about the lives of women in history were nothing new for me. I came to genealogy as a 12-year-old with questions about my own grandmother’s parents and I never stopped wondering about all of the women in my family and beyond. My interest in women’s history continued as an undergrad. I was a history major at an all-female college and my department head and advisor was an amazing historian who had been educated at Smith College, another all-female school. The goal was the same as history majors at any other school, but there was also a very purposeful look at the place of women in history in my program. Though I graduated many years ago now, that attention to the lives of the females in history has never waned. I’ve continued to try to learn more about the lives of the wives, mothers, and sisters ever since in my genealogical work. So, while the old blog was a place to work through anything that came my way, and my overall excitement about new discoveries may occasionally creep into this new blog, I’d like this to be a place to showcase women in history. Be on the lookout for case studies on the wives, mothers, and sisters, plus references and reviews, helpful tips, and anything else that might be beneficial in obtaining a fuller picture of those female ancestors in our family histories.