Two anniversaries

This is a big anniversary in a couple of ways, and while I don’t want to interrupt the flow of documentation this blog is intended to journal, it would respect the spirit of this work to include a brief mention.

My mother’s passing

First and foremost, this week marks the anniversary of my mother’s death. This blog hasn’t had much to say about Janice Paige Cleaton, because it’s a chronicle of my patrilineal descent along a particular Scottish line. My mom’s side of the family is equally fascinating, though for different reasons, and will likely spawn an investigation in a new blog when my work here is exhausted. Her people can be found among Missouri settlers with ties to Daniel Boone on her mother’s side, and on her father’s side a line of nobility through the Claytons of Sussex, England that may stretch all the way back to Lord Hugh de Clayton, a Norman invader. There is certainly more reflected glory to live in on my mother’s side.

She was a fun-loving, lucid, rascally daredevil who had lapsed into a debilitating dementia by the time she passed at age 82, on Mother’s Day of all days. A decade earlier, she broke her knee playing kickball when she topped the ball with her foot and fell. I hope I’m still as active, though a bit more careful, when it’s my turn to be 72!

The founding of this blog

The second anniversary of note here is the 1 year mark for the beginning of this blog. I think my mom’s death catalyzed an interest in gathering our family history in a journal, though I had started working on it as a Covid hobby during lockdown. I really didn’t expect much from this little blog. At most, I thought it would just a be good way to keep track of my notes, resources, and progress.

It has since morphed into an extension of my art and design practice, and has gained a small bit of traction on the web. Over 300 people from a dozen countries have visited these posts just over 900 times. That’s an average of about 2.5 visits per day. This isn’t setting any land speed records for sure, but for a niche blog of very narrow personal interest, well, I’m pleasantly surprised by that frequency.

A progress report

I’m now at what I believe to be about 80% completion on the research of the descendancy of Peter Cromar 1690, a project that the acquisition of Ron Cromar’s genealogy notes instigated back in late November. I’ve been working on it in between the cracks for about 6 months.

As of today, I have found just over 4100 persons, thousands on the direct line from Peter Cromar, and thousands more who are associated families who married into the line. I’m in the middle of Generation 8. There were about 1200 people in Generation 7, and so far a similar pattern of density seems to be holding for Generation 8. I can foresee a significant melt in Generation 9, because in that time frame I’m beginning to bump into a lot of people who are living (like me… I’m a Gen 9 grandkid of Peter), so I have no direct record to place in the database. Spitballing, I believe the database will top out at around 5200 persons.

Tedium

The work is tedious, often so repetitive that I find myself dozing off on my laptop and discovering row upon row of fsdaasdfaesfr1asd;fklafas as my hand drifts across the keyboard with no alert will to guide it! But, as I’ve quoted before, Joseph Priestly remarked, “Laborious and tedious as the compilation of this work has been… a variety of views were continually opening upon me during the execution of it… .” This quotation has become a lifeline for me as I do my due diligence.

With my teaching having wound down for the term, I can devote extra time to this task and knock it out. If I can process about a hundred entries a day — and if there are no messes to clear up in Family Search, I can get about 20 done in an hour — we can certainly expect this to be compiled by the end of the month. Then the fun work of data visualization can begin.

I should point out: this pace is lightning fast when one imagines doing this work in the pre-Big-Data days of paper and microfilm locked way in dusty archives. We are able to do in months what probably would have taken decades, if it could be done at all. For all its current flaws, there are some days that I just love the internet.