Thursday, January 20, 2022

got about an inch of snow here and then a cold spell, so some of it is still around. the intense new mexico sun will melt whatever it can but lots of it, in the mountains, is in just enough shade to stick around until it truly gets warm. and it's in no hurry to get warm.

a guy wrote to me about genealogy (see the comment under the picture of me, below) and i told him how to find what he was looking for. i'm not sure who he would be, as i only have his initials, but i encourage anyone on the quest to find who we are and from whence we came, so i put some interesting and useful genealogy links right in the comments. one is to the web archive, which will help you find all kinds of things i put on the web at one time or another....there is really no limit, since it very carefully recorded all kinds of pages and my somewhat random ones were right there in their collection. The web archive is really a kind of remarkable resource.

i've spent a lot of time lately in newspapers.com, another incredible resource, as though it is not complete it has just enough of a wide range of newspapers to haul in all kinds of useful information. unbelievable. and it turns out that as far as i can tell, the main advantage of ancestry.com, an also-incredible resource, is that it just harvested every single line from US censuses and city directories, so that now you can take almost anyone who lived in the US in the last three hundred years, and know where they were at least through the decades.

however these are kind of a rabbit hole when what i really want is to finish my latest book, which is a fantastic one but which requires a lot of time that i don't have. instead of digging into old newspapers like i want to do, instead i'm marketing my books one reader at a time by basically reading theirs. and here i find myself in elaborate worlds of fantasy, sometimes involving drone-like characters who have human responses programmed out of them, and in other cases lurid tales of drug-running in England involving such poor command of the english language one can hardly read them. they too are interesting but are big rabbit holes.

on my way to lubbock in the morning. will bring home lots of pictures, i hope. it's cold, very januaryish, both here and in lubbock, and i'm missing my parents a lot, as both died in january. an inch of snow, though, i can handle that. it's not going to keep me from driving anywhere.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home