Mowing the Lawn

Braeden has been bitten by the family history bug lately.  We spent a few hours this weekend signing him up for and exploring the new Family Search web site .  I haven't had much experience with the old site , but the new one feels fairly slick and isn't too hard to use.  It's a simple premise.  The site sits on top of a massive genealogical index maintained by the LDS Church .  You log into the site and enter your personal information.  Then you start building out your family tree one person and generation at a time.  If the person next in your tree is living, then you enter the personal information you know about that person.  If the person is dead, you search the index for a record of that person.  If you're lucky, the record of your ancestor will already be linked to other ancestors and your family tree will begin to fill in on its own.  You suddenly have access to the work of others and others can benefit from the connections and corrections you make. You will come...

My mother joined us for dinner on Friday night.  After the kids went to bed, we sat in the family room discussing this and that.  I started talking about something I'd come across the other day when researching words that have crossed over into English from the Chinook Jargon —a trade language that developed in the Pacific Northwest. Thelma commented that I know the strangest stuff and she has no idea where I get it from.  She told my mom how we had been visiting Vancouver earlier in the week to soak in the Olympic atmosphere.  As we were walking from the torch to the train station, we came across a small mass of people and cameras buzzing around somebody outside the media center.  We stopped to see who it was and I recognized the man at the center of the crowd as Gordon Campbell , the Premier of British Columbia. "I don't know how he knows this stuff," Thelma said. I couldn't tell if she was impressed or mocking me.  More than once, Thelma has reminded me that I ...