Mightier Acorns

Whenever we share our stories here on the web, we have a bias towards sharing successes – or at least spinning our adventures as some kind of progress.

When we don’t do that, we err the other way, emphasizing the dramatic crises we faced, which we usually resolve in some satisfying way. This is the job of a narrative: to give us (writer and reader) some kind of resolution.

The past few weeks have presented some challenges. If I’m honest, some of the hurdles made me grumpy. I solved a few, gave up on others, and made my peace with a handful of others. And when I thought to tell you about them, I decided not to give you a satisfying narrative resolution.

Tech vs. Plans

You might have seen me mention my Callan Name Study a couple of times. I struggled to get started, and eventually learned about WikiTree’s One Name tree app, which allowed me to export a spreadsheet with a line for every WikiTree profile under a particular surname.

A spreadsheet is useful, but after poking at it for a few weeks and trying a few tricks to export something similar from either Ancestry or FamilySearch, I remembered that when I had RootsMagic a few years ago, it had the ability to sync with at least one of those services. And thus I embarked on a quest to see if I could make RootsMagic run on my Linux system.

Saturday and Sunday, the inside of my head looked like my featured picture. Find a problem, search for a solution, try the solution, success/fail; repeat. Sometimes my mental bicycles crashed into each other, and I had to start over. (Also, we received a couple of tons of soil for our garden, so this was after several hours of physical labor, which actually helped.) But as of this week, I managed to get a virtual machine up and running Windows, upgraded from RM7 to RM11, and I’m happily importing the “Oldest Common Ancestors” from my spreadsheet into a new “Callan Name Study” tree.

The real test will come when I get a “critical mass” of people imported and start trying to link their trees together… and then try to Harmonize the FamilySearch and WikiTree trees so they all have (more or less) the same information.

Status: sort of resolved. Still Working.

People Power

Now that I have some of the tech hurdles solved (leaving others in limbo, but… ) I am realizing that I’ve committed to running a Project on WikiTree. I expect this will cause some headaches, especially if the people who are attracted to my project are anything like me.

Remember, a while back when I said I was signing up for the Tartan Trail? And then never really mentioned it again? Well, that’s because I sort of flunked out of the Scotland Project.

I knew when I signed up that a project like this would probably be hard to manage, would depend on volunteer labor, and would require patience. After I signed up, I was added to the wait list for a “guide” to become available. That took nearly six weeks. When I finally got a guide for my first lesson, I reminded myself that this person was a volunteer and that I needed to try to learn what she had to teach at the pace and level she was willing to teach it.

Right away, I had problems with the material. It wasn’t terribly advanced stuff, but it was aimed at very green, uninitiated researchers with little or no experience editing Wikis. There were several things that could be taken in more than one way, and a couple of standards for sourcing material that I felt were incorrect.

For example, the course was aimed at getting users familiar with searching for Scottish records using (among others) the Scotland’s People website (https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/). I was excited to learn more about effective search strategies and getting into the records. But I quickly learned that while the index is very complete, you can only see the original records if you pay for them – and a certificate costs £12. Of course, the course didn’t require anyone to purchase anything, but they insisted on building source citations out of the index records. And when I found the record on another site, they would “correct” me and remind me to cite the same information (which I only knew now that I had seen the full record) as if it came from Scotland’s People.

I did my best to ignore the things I thought were being taught wrong in order to pass and learn what mysteries awaited at level 2, but my guide decided that I had been using the WikiTree Sourcer app to create my citations, and I finally told her to stop nitpicking over the wording I was using in my citations if the information wasn’t wrong.

She decided not to pass me out of Level One, and I decided I didn’t need to spend another 12 weeks not learning anything new.

I did at least get familiar with Scotland’s People, and that has been handy. But now I am dreading the day that karma sends someone just like me to volunteer for my Name Study.

Glimmers of Delight

In spite of the grumpy moments, and the lack of a satisfying narrative resolution, I am happy to be making some headway, so maybe this Name Study will start generating some interesting stories to tell.

All I can do is try to keep my feet on the pedals!