Reflections On My Dream

The beginnings of my other post Once I Had A Dream was written in the early 90s. I guess I was destined to write a blog before they even became popular.  Just before I started Wisteria, I was going through my desk drawers and found some boxes of old diskettes of mine which included some old genealogy writing I had done. I had completely forgotten about them. Or maybe somewhere in my mind I remembered without realizing it consciously since it’s somewhat serendipitous that I ran across these old writings at around the same time I launched this blog. I mentioned that in my dream I had a book that held the answers to my genealogy problems. You know what the name of that book was? Wisteria.
Because I’m not one to jump on the new technology bandwagon as quickly as others, it so happens that the computer I have now still has the capability of reading those old diskettes. So I took the time to transfer the data from those old diskettes to a jump drive. Jump drives are probably not quite the latest technology but at least I have moved up a decade or two in my current data storage.
I was perusing through Kerry Scott’s ClueWagon blog the other day and was reading her post on smacking her 1995 self. I was reminded of my dream stuff because that came from MY 1995 self. (And Kerry, if you’re reading this, I fall in the purple ink category.) You can’t read her posts without laughing out loud half the time. It’s just kind of embarrassing when that happens in the library, though. Anyway, her post talked about the "atrocities" she committed as a genealogy newbie. We’ve all done it. I was particularly pleased to read that even the Queen of Citation herself, Elizabeth Shown Mills, was once a lowly peasant in the land of genealogy (click here to see her comments to one of Kerry’s other posts). As a mother, I could relate to the experiences of both Kerry and Elizabeth, when they discussed juggling the demands of young children while trying to find dead people.
But time stands still for no one. And just as our children grow and learn new skills, so do we.

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