Ancestry, Personal

11232014 Ancestry Is Serendipitous

Ancestry has taught me some strange lessons – in math, history, genetics and personal stories. It has defined the word “serendipity” for me. I’ve learned so many things that have nothing to do with who my great-grandparents might have been.

An example: 80% of all marriages in history have been between 2nd cousins or closer. This is because of the lack of suitable mates outside the 5-mile zone of a typical person’s reach for most of history. Without war or some similar disaster, people stayed put in their little worlds.

This results in pedigree collapse, a reduction in the number of ancestors due to duplication along bloodlines. 1200 AD is the widest point for our family trees; before that, the number of ancestors above us was drastically smaller to geographical limitations. (Today, you would have 128 5th Great-grandparents, spanning back an average of only around 200 years ago.) Think about it. Without pedigree collapse, going back a few thousand years would result in a # of ancestors greater than the entire world population by many factors.In a given group or ethnicity, it’s a certainty that we all are 15th cousins or less – and probably much less, without knowing it. We are much more connected that you probably realize. You have over a million 8th cousins.

I’ve found a lot of fascinating things along the way, including people’s missing birth fathers, birth certificates, and even ties to royalty. (For what it is worth, you are connected to royalty. It’s a certainty. Wealth contributed greatly to lineage and it also afforded people’s connections to be recorded, unlike most commoners.)

Social Rules

11232014 Grief Porn, Mourning Sickness

http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=9652&picture=crying&large=1  Link to original picture by Peter Griffin

Glossophilia Link to “Mourning Sickness” and “Grief Porn”

Gawker Article About Grief Porn

I’ve had a working draft about “grief porn” sitting in my queue to finish for about a year. No matter how I approached it, I couldn’t finish it. Anything I said came off as unintentionally harsh or dismissive. It’s not a trend that I fully understand. It certainly affects me. Some of the content is very well done and is virtually impossible to avoid getting a visceral reaction to it.

I deleted it and instead decided to go with a couple of links about the idea. I like the term “mourning sickness” better, as the cliché of adding the suffix ‘porn’ to everything has accelerated a bit too much in the last couple of years.

Following social media, you can see that the mourning sickness trend is much more prevalent than it used to be. Technology has made it much more difficult to create and distribute, in real-time. People have become more accustomed to it and this has loosened people’s tolerance of it. Much of the coverage about it seems to focus on the minority of those who thrive on consuming it.

It’s difficult to know how to process much of it, as I don’t have a personal connection to much of it. Some critics say that it’s a way to socially demonstrate that we are compassionate and identify with human emotion. Others say that it’s a variation on “elation porn,” the drive toward saturating everything with “feel good” stories and content. (Surprising someone with a new house, a returning soldier appears by magic at a sporting event…) The ice bucket challenge earlier this year was an example of the overall tendency, although it doesn’t fit neatly into any of the categories.

Minimalism

10252014 First And Always: What Will It Be Used For?

As a wanna-be minimalist, it bothers me that we generally don’t stop to think closely about what we need an item for. Secondly, if we need an item, what exactly do we need it to do?

If I “need” another cellphone, the only things I require are texting and calls. Almost all other features are a waste of time, space and consideration, as well adding the needless complexity in life.

If you are buying a computer, the worst thing to do is to decide which brand you want first. The primary consideration should be what you expect to do with the device. Secondary considerations would include size, portability, interoperability, etc. How much of our tech burnout results from doing the process backwards? We run out and buy the latest tablet without consideration of its limitations and drawbacks, focusing solely on price or how stylish it might be. Or we buy a Mac thinking that it will be more reliable, forgetting that we don’t have the tech knowledge or interest to learn how to do everything all over again with another OS.

What do you need a new item to do? Always narrow that option first and be true to your decision. Half the battle is fought by how you define it.

Minimalism aside, if the item is something that you find appealing or beautiful, the practicality of it isn’t the major priority. But you can’t clutter your house with a million items that you find appealing.

Minimalism

12232014 Your Keys Say It All

Having read a lot over the last few weeks, another thing I’ve always believed is a common belief among many minimalists: Keys.

The more you have or the bigger your keychain, the less likely you are to have a simple life. Keys basically demand that your life have a multilayer worry factor stressing you out.

Why in the world would you carry a dozen keys in your pocket? I carry 1. I can easily fold mine into the little coin pocket of my pants where they don’t press against my leg, fall out, etc.If I need others, they are in the appropriate place. Carrying the ‘just in case’ mentality too far means you can’t feel comfortable leaving keys in the glovebox, even though you always go to the mail in your vehicle. But the ‘what if’ insists that you carry them on you, ‘just in case’ some unimaginable scenario were to arise.

People with extra keys also tend to have mailboxes they don’t need, storage units, keys to the in-laws, keys to  god-knows-what lying around. I’ve noted that these people also are the ones who can’t find a specific key when an emergency arises, or they rely so much on “having everything” that they overlook a key and assume they have it when the actually don’t.

One of everyone’s projects should be to look at their keys and minimize the number they “must have.” Otherwise, I’ve found that you can take all identifying information off your extra keys and put them somewhere mostly hidden. (Having said that, I’ve also observed that those people carrying too many keys seem to have the their name, phone number, car model, and address on their keys. Not a good idea.)

There are some great things online to help you cleverly hide your keys without resorting to the cliché of using a pot or rock to conceal your keys.

When I had the doors in my house redone, I finally got one of my biggest wishes fulfilled. I had a keypad door lock installed on the door I use most often. I can go outside without fear of being locked out and can set a guest access code for a one-time entry for things such as pet care, emergency access and so forth. One less key!

Gift, Holiday, Whimsical

11212014 Great Kid Ornaments

The picture above is an example of xmas ornaments I used to make out of color photos, stickers, paint/fingernail polish, and tape. By putting the year on the photo, I could indicate how old the child was, as well as the year. After a few years, any tree begins to tell a story of who is in the family. It was something that I could get one child to help with another child’s ornament.

Ancestry

11222014 Finding A Non-Existent Birth Certificate

Of all my accomplishments with research, I am most proud to have been able to locate one of my previous manager’s birth certificates. He had infrequently tried in vain to locate his birth record.

He was born overseas due to his father being in the military. I knew that some sort of record had to exist, even if a series of unfortunate errors had transpired.

After 4 + decades, he still didn’t have his birth certificate and wasn’t certain that one existed. That he made it so many years avoiding the necessity of showing a birth certificate is quite a surprise.  In this modern age, it is nigh on impossible to obtain a passport without one, even when trying to use the alternate route to obtain a passport. The fact that he had been a military brat was both the cause and the reason he could move around in society without a birth certificate.

As is often the case, I had a eureka moment on ancestry.com after making an error researching something else entirely. Like so many errors, it occurred to me that the error was actually a useful way to look at my manager’s problem differently. From there, it was absurdly easy. I learned a lot of things on during this process. Without the initial error, though, the process would have taken much longer.

After locating the record, I was certain that it would be difficult beyond measure to actually order an original birth certificate from overseas. I registered on the United Kingdom website with my crazy name and paid for the document.

Within a couple of weeks, I had a strange, exotic envelope in it with someone else’s birth certificate.

The look of surprise on my manager’s face when I handed him his own birth certificate was priceless.
…and it reminded me yet again that sometimes errors are the only way to look at problems in such as a way as to see them differently enough to solve them.

Gift, Holiday

1116204 Picture Blankets

Leave a comment
This picture demonstrates the lack of “pillow control” my cousin suffers from.

 

Whether you choose Wal-Mart or Snapfish, or some other photo service, they offer an interesting ability to have photos printed on blankets and pillowcases. I always encourage people to actually use the ones I have made, but many prefer to use them as “throws” or decorations. You can have just about any picture or picture printed, too.

As a minimalist, I don’t need a lot of pillow cases. But I would prefer that all of them were personalized and interesting like the one above, using a goofy picture of me and my wife taken at a children’s birthday party.

12008 jimmy noah at his apart (15)(4)This picture is of my cousin Jimmy and his son Noah. That pillow case was Noah’s pride and job for years. One of the funny stories of Jimmy’s cancer is that he accidentally put it in the microwave to heat it late night to heat it. It caught fire.

I don’t have pictures of many of the others, but I’ve had several sets of pillow cases made for the children of friends and co-workers. They’ve always been met with absolute joy and glee. Many of the kids uses them as sleeping bags when they are small.

I’ve also had many more blankets made than this. Unfortunately, I either don’t have pictures or the recipients didn’t pose with their gifts. There were a few really crazy blankets that I should have sent to myself after having them made to get a picture. One, for example, was a blanket intended to be used as a lap blanket at a Razorback’s game, ridiculing opponents. The other had 96 smaller pictures on it and looked bizarrely pretty when I designed the picture placement.