My weblog

My family history and genealogy site for Mac users, MacGenealogist.com, has a sister site for the other platform. I launched PCGenealogist.com on October 24th.

I was concerned that the Mac community would be confused or just not happy with my support of the PC. I decided to go ahead because my interest is helping genealogists and family historians regardless of their computer platform choice.

I remain committed to improving the state of genealogy on the Mac. I think PCGenealogist.com can, ironically, help toward that end as well.

I’ve been reading Grass of the Earth for evidence that my wife’s great-grandfather, Thorsten Roan was born Tosten Raaen. It’s written by Tosten Raaen’s sister, Aagot Raaen, as a story of Norwegian settlers in 1800’s North Dakota and is quite interesting in it’s own right.

I borrowed the book from the library and as I waited for it to arrive I bought a used copy of Aagot Raaen’s autobiography, Measure of My Days. I had been holding off on skimming it in order to avoid spoiling Grass of the Earth, but I couldn’t manage. I checked the end finding nothing, then the postscript and found some of the evidence I sought: Tosten Raaen was killed in an automobile accident as was Thorsten Roan.

I’ve taken to genealogy! Documenting the Sayer, Bigsby, Puglisi, and Cederna family histories is fascinating, fun, and time consuming.

It’s terribly easy to just burn along finding branches and filling in details (thanks to Ancestry.com and its users), but this is how errors are made. I’m trying to restrain myself by learning and applying methods. The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy came highly recommended and so I ordered it for my birthday and started reading it. Meanwhile I’ll slake my thirst for discovery by populating my “hypothetical Sayer family tree” with reasonable guesses. I feel safe doing so because I have set it to private so others don’s see it and take it as serious research. My intent is to use it to capture hypotheses for later research.

Now that I’ve created benfsayer.com, I’ve got everything (I’m working on) in its place and a place for (blog posts about) everything. In this place I’ll capture my thoughts on things I’m working on that don’t belong within the thing. For example, I’m setting up a podcast called husband-tools. I’m not going to post about setting it up or operating it on the accompanying blog, but rather on this one. Likewise my posts about thingstoteach.com will be here.