Serendipity…My Favorite Word to Live

Have you ever had a gift so completely unexpected fall in your lap that time stands still and you have no words to express the shock and awe? Something that threatens and promises to suck up all of your time and energy, and you can’t help but shout “thank you!” to the Universe for its well-orchestrated conspiracy to put you right where it needed you to get something magnificent done?

Isn’t that serendipity?

Could a starving man stumbling upon a banquet be more grateful than I am?

Last night the heavens opened and dropped a project through the dark night into a stagnating life. Mine.

“Betsy, have you seen what’s in these file cabinets?” my friend called to me from the office. I had the keys in my hand ready to lock up and was hurrying because I was already over half an hour late getting home.

I figured that they were full of useless and out-dated papers that we’d throw away as we made time to get better organized, freeing ourselves of the clutter that had accumulated over the years and had survived the scrutiny of several directors of the Cape Cod Family History Center.

Actually, I don’t think that those drawers had been opened in years.

Three file cabinets stuffed with file after file of original and copied photos of people and places of the area dating back over a hundred years were tucked in the corner of our office. And if it had been a living, breathing thing it would have done a happy dance as we started looking through its contents.

I get the chills every time I think about it.

I really wish we could camp out in the Center and work every day ’til we are done. But, we’ll never be done. Not really.

We will scan the pictures, organize the files as we look for the descendants of the people on the pictures who I know still live nearby. We’ll call the Historical Society and see if they’re interested in copies.

It boggles my mind that we stumbled upon this treasure that has sat right under our noses and those of our predecessors for so long!

Has anyone been wondering where some of their family photos went? How are they going to feel when they get our call telling them that we found them? Are they going to be as excited as we were? Those questions have been hounding me since last night. We can take our time contacting the owners, making sure that the work to preserve them is done before we hand them over. Someone obviously felt that they were important enough to share with the Center that they were filed away for safe keeping. We’ll honor that trust by making simple family trees that we can prepare for Family Search, as well as a free, private account with Legacy Stories that will stay private until we receive permission to make it public.

There are even hand-written and typed family stories in some of the files!

I’m so excited. So is my partner in crime! She and I will probably open up the Center every night of the week until this work is done.

We’ve been sucked in!

Family History and the Art of Cloning

Do you have ANY idea how many people are excited to start and/or work on their family history? The answer doesn’t matter unless they all walk through the Family History Center door at the same time with a smile on their face, papers in their hands, and a steady gaze that says, “Help me!” AND they’re all looking at you!

I was sitting with one young woman, shaking hands with four visitors, while saying “Hi! You’re back!” to Cathy (with a C, not a K, I learned)…

And then the phone rang!

It’s quite a challenge to stay composed when you are anything but calm on the inside. I’ve never mastered talking to more than one person at the same time (I’ve practiced for 26 years with 9 children and the only thing I’ve learned is to NEVER make eye contact with anyone but he with whom you are talking. Acknowledge them with a hand wave and a “just a minute” finger, but that’s it or they’ll start talking over everyone else.)

Long story short, I believe in miracles.

I hung up the phone and turned to Cathy who sat patiently waiting for her turn.

“So. What are we doing tonight?” I asked as we pulled up FamilySearch.org  and Ancestry.com. She fidgeted for a minute because she didn’t have an answer.

And then I saw it! “Look at you! You made it!” On her lap sat a perfectly organized accordion folder, full of files that we’d put in piles the week before. Do you know how excited I was? She’d taken my advice and spent a bit of time getting what she had in order.

“How do you like it?”

Cathy was a changed woman. Her confidence had grown so much. She opened the folder and pulled out a file, showing me the label and accompanying pictures for the family that had taken up residence inside. We added a family group sheet to each folder and spent an hour searching for records in one of them, We drew timeline on the front, copied documents and placed them in the folder, updating the family group sheet as we went.

She was thrilled to be able to make some progress where her deceased sister had left off. She was getting closer to her goal of having four generations of her family history documented and ready to share with her sisters when she visits them in August.

Next Tuesday we’ll make an account for her with Legacy Stories. She’ll start with a free one, and we’ll add her sisters so that they can see and share everything she’s working on. We’ll scan and upload the pile of old photos she showed me, and maybe make 5 of the Talking Photos(they come with the free account, too).

We’ll look at The Leave a Legacy program( family tree website) and see if it’s a good fit for her family. If so, we’ll upload her GEDcom file from Ancestry into it.

Everything was falling into place for her. Soon she won’t need me anymore.

And then it dawned on me…

I can be very bold, usually with no warning.

“Cathy? Would you start volunteering here in two weeks?”

You see, there’s no way that two consultants can help everyone. The Center is getting very active. I’m waiting for approval for 4 other consultants, but my gift of impatience got the better of me, and much to the surprise of my friend sitting across the room, I decided to go fishing for the fish sitting right next to me instead of wait for the imaginary ones in the other pond.

“Sure!” she said with a smile. No hesitation. No sign of insecurity.

“The only problem I might have is navigating screens.” she admitted.

“All you have to do is help someone who knows less than you do. Just stay a few steps ahead of them and you’ll learn very quickly.” I assured her.

Done.

It really does make a difference to ask. You know?

With a lot of mini-me’s I can spend more time on MY family history, and researching and writing stories. It’s a win-win! Or a win-win-win-win!!

• I win freedom for other pursuits by training people to do my job
• The Center benefits because when something happens and I can’t show up, the work goes on.
• People are given the opportunity to learn and grow at an accelerated pace, and then give back by serving someone with their knowledge and skills
• The cycle repeats as those new consultants train the next wave!

Easy!!

Now…to apply that concept to housework!

I Ain’t No Mind Reader!

Thursday night was painful. At least it started out that way. You know that feeling of being brain-dead and tongue-tied while someone has just professed their undying confusion and their eyes are pleading with you to fix their problem, but all you want to say is, “You lost me at ‘Hello'”?

What do YOU do?

I smile and silently pray my guts out that we both don’t go careening over the embankment into the “She Has No Idea What She’s Doing” ditch. It works every time, as long as I keep asking questions. But not too many. That could be annoying. It’s a slippery slope.

Here’s what I learned. You are confused. Family history/genealogy can seem overwhelming, especially for us older folks who resisted technology until we couldn’t any more, and are in the process of rewiring the circuits in our brains- the ones that come with the newer models like my 10-year-old daughter who can see the same Facebook game that I see for the first time and knows immediately how to play it, whereas I feel like all of my clicking is going to make something REALLY bad happen.

Second thing I found out about myself? As good a listener and smiler as I might profess to be, I ain’t no mind reader! And I’m not on speaking terms with Alexander who “knows all”, or Zoltar , his brother, which I established in a previous post.

And neither is your computer. If you are going to enjoy genealogy and family history you have to know what you can find to help you on the Internet and what you can’t.

Not everything about a person’s life will be searchable on the WorldWideWeb (unless you blogged about it or added it to LegacyStories.org). I might be able to find out when someone came to America, but not when the tooth fairy collected her first installment of baby teeth from my 4th great grandfather. And that’s important to know!

It took about 10 minutes with each patron to get an idea of what they were seeing when they thought of genealogy so that I could give them a new picture, one that made sense and would never confuse them. Honestly, I felt like I was cutting new paths in the Amazon Rain Forest.

One had gaps in his ancestor’s lives that he wanted to fill with facts. Facts from documents. Facts from documents that may or may not be digitized or put on the Internet, yet. He had to figure out not only what his question was, like, “How can I find my great grandparents?”, or, “Did they own land in the 1800’s?”, but he also had to have a basic understanding of how to map a life and know what type of document would have the answers he was looking for.

I’ve said it before, but here goes again. Timelines. You can read and return. I’ll wait. Once he understood, his searching was a piece of cake. (Exaggeration!)

The other man was dealing with overwhelm. Well-meaning people had given him software that was taking too much of his time to figure out and was leaving him too tired to focus on what mattered to him.

While sitting and talking with him I felt a quiet desperation. When he walked in the door at the beginning of his session I heard him say, “I’m confused, overwhelmed, and disorganized.” Most of us, when faced with those feelings get in our figurative car and drive in the other direction. But he also said ,”I need help. I want to leave something for my children when I’m gone.”

THAT was the motivator. That was the goal. THAT was what I kept bringing him back to when I knew his brain was on overload. We agreed that he needed to simplify and focus on writing his ancestors’ stories sooner than later. And he had to remember to share his works-in-progress, whether it be a family tree or a story.

I showed him LegacyStories.org where he could create his own family tree website to share with family and friends NOW. He would have to learn how to upload a Gedcom file and I promised to help. I showed him my dad’s talking photo and explained how all of his could be scanned and shared, too.  He agreed and was quite relieved to recommit to his main objective of being able to leave something behind that would matter to his family.

I was so happy for him. He’d reached out for some help and had actually helped me! It’s easy for me to get overwhelmed by people’s confusion and to forget that I’m pretty simple-minded…in a good way.

I’m so thrilled that I can’t read your mind, and I’m more than happy to declutter and refocus yours if you want!