Friday Update

So I've been doing my best to catch up on my tree now that November's over.

And I've also been posting an Advent Calendar this year for my ancestors, and I've done the first three posts, all on my dad's father's side of the family so far, but I've got a plan for how to space them out. I've had fun with them so far, and I'm learning more about what's missing from each as I write them up, and they're getting a bit longer with each person I write up. I am pleased to discover that, despite the fact that I'm starting with my great-great grandparents, I believe I have photos of all of the people I'm writing up, but three of them.

Follow Friday:
Just one post today.

Randy Seaver of Genea-musings discusses Standardizing Place Names in genealogy. Definitely a difficult subject, given that everyone has at least one ancestor who can trace their line back to an area that no longer exists or no longer has the same name as when our ancestor came from that location.

Tapestry.com
I have also been playing with a new toy today. I'm not sure what I think of it, yet, but if there was a software program that used the information taken from the questions at the site, I would definitely consider buying it. The site is called Tpstry.com aka Tapestry.com, and it is not your usual online genealogy site.

You create a (currently free) account, and fill in your name, then it begins to ask you questions. You can have several family groups on the site, and can invite friends and family to answer the questions as well. Some of the questions are a bit silly or otherwise jarring, like "what sex is this person" and "is this person still alive," but you can also make up your own questions, and therefore can configure it to what you need to learn about your family members.

From these questions, you create timelines and interrelationships between the people listed, not to mention a basic family tree, though the family tree part of the site isn't particularly great yet.

I've run across a few minor flaws in the programming, but the site is still very new, and I'm hoping that it will only improve from here on.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:
Randy Seaver's blog had a good fun post this past Saturday, and I can't resist it.

1) Think about the games that your whole family would play when you were a child.

2) Tell us about one (or more) of them - what was it called, what were the rules (as you remember them), who played the game, where did you play the game, who usually won?

3) Write your own blog post, or write a comment on this post, or write a Facebook comment or note.

There are six years between myself and my sister, so I spent a lot of time when she was young making up ways to distract and to entertain her. Quite a number of games come to mind, really.

When she was very small, we used to play hide and seek, but she was too young to understand that she had to wait, and she was definitely to young to count yet, so I would tell her to wait where she was, then run ahead an try to find a place to hid before she could run after me. We actually had quite a lot of fun with the game, and played it quite often.

We also inherited a number of games, most of which were missing pieces in varying amounts, meaning we often had to loot other games to play anything. Which led to the idea of combining them.

Our favorite, which we played a number of times, was Payday, which I got from someone for a Christmas or Birthday present one year, but was rather dull on its own, so we would combine it with the game of Life, and occasionally with the game Careers. We'd play a month of Payday, then start the game of Life using the money we'd gained in that first round rather than what we were supposed to start with according to Life. When we got to the choice of career path, we would use Careers if we chose to go onto the university track to determine our career, and only play a month of payday if we landed on a Payday to determine how much we got. It made for exceptionally long games, but it also gave variation to games that I think we would otherwise have grown bored of.

So many more games I could mention, though. Monopoly, which my sister says she got good at defensively because she was so much younger than I. Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, and Scattegories, all of which we played at family gatherings for several years in a row. My sister and I are extremely scary when it comes to Pictionary--there have been times when one or the other of us have drawn a single line--and the other guessed it. There was also Take Off, gotten to improve my sister's geography, and Mille Bornes, which had their day...

Really, we played a lot of games as kids. It's one thing I miss quite a bit, really.

Family Tree Calendar:
Just one event for this week.
Hans Knudsen and Christine Jensdatter married on December 2, 1854 in Vejle, Denmark.