Yesterday’s BCG work

Yesterday I was able to solve my missing marriage problem by translating one of these buggers.

At least reading these land records is a lot quicker than reading the 60+ pages of my “land records,” AKA Wells Fargo Home Mortgage HUD.

Yay! I have a solid Case Study that I’ve solved and written a draft for! Now I just need to make it a whole lot better by writing and citing it up, and continuing to search for records and fixing my shabby translation. Sounds like I am going to be doing this for a reallllly long time.

But, hey, it’s on my direct ancestral line, for my fourth great grandpa Wenzel Brosch. It feels awesome to put in so much time and effort on my own family research. It’s just very meaningful to me.

I do miss client work, though. I think that 8ish month stint I had taking clients taught me two very important things: I can do it, and I really want to do it. It’s almost like my end goal. I know, though, that I should become a CG first, and that because my available time to spend on genealogy is currently so limited, I have to prioritize. I choose certification first, business and clients later. I know that it will make me a much, much better researcher to have the experience of successfully passing this test behind me. This is mainly because the creation of this portfolio is the teaching.

To me, becoming BCG certified feels like a rigorous college course (much more rigorous than some of the ones I took, honestly!) in which the entire semester is creating a thing which determines whether you pass or fail. Dude, I would have worked a lot harder in some of my courses if everything I did had bearing on whether or not I passed or failed! I didn’t take any difficult pass/fail courses; only super insanely easy ones where your attendance determined whether you passed. So, I don’t know with any certainty that this comparison is valid, but I imagine it would be similar to some of those rigorous nursing or pre-med courses, or even board exams, where it is literally all pass/fail.

:::shudder::: I’m so, so, so glad to not be a doctor. I’ll stick to dead people.