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Weekly Update: 17 March 2018

Posted on 9 March 201817 March 2018 by kate.challis

It was spring break this week and I did a lot of childcare and comparatively little genealogy research. I did write up the Krčmarský stuff I found, which was extremely helpful for several reasons:

  • Now I know which questions to ask next. Writing helped me to organize my research.
  • I was able to share it with some new cousins. More about that later.

Other stuff: just chugging along steadily on my writing and co-writing projects. I have to say that I love both, but I’m pretty sure co-writing/co-translating is the most enjoyable. I really love people. It can be really frustrating when people are the limiting factor in a project or group effort. I struggle to work with some people, but consistently enjoy working in a group (a small group with competent people I admire) more than working on my own.

Some website things were briefly glanced at but not finished because of it being spring break.

I also spent quite a lot of time playing around with DNA painter and the other DNA tools. I discovered some great things including how to it can fit in with my Czech research now – more on that later.

All in all, a really slow week. Today we went to the temple and the Omaha zoo. For dinner we ate green things in honor of our Irish heritage (me, 1%, Danny, 9% – but that’s according to Ancestry’s ethnicity estimates; other places give us vastly different results. Still, that seems about right according to what we know about our family).

In the past, I’ve focused my genealogy research during the time around St. Patrick’s day on the very sad search to find Patrick McQueen. This year I bought grandpa McQueen a Y-DNA test with 111 markers at RootsTech, and I visited with him and grandma when I gave it to him, which was this year’s Irish effort.

You ought to pause and take a few moments to appreciate the awesomeness that is Czech genealogy, especially in comparison to Irish genealogy. I am obviously talking about the research aspect of it. Truly, the biggest struggles in Czech research are first locating and then reading records. This is not easy, but it is possible! The biggest struggles in Irish research are navigating major national record loss events. It’s not easy, and I’m really not sure if it’s always possible to circumvent these losses. Czech and German may be terribly difficult languages for English speakers to learn, but one *can* do it. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to reconstruct missing parish records, censuses, and tax records with…dog license registrations. Also, Irish genealogy inevitably leads to researching the Potato famine aka an Gorta Mór (actually, our Irish people came at least a decade earlier, but yet I still always end up reading about it), which is horrific. Czech history has its fair share of horrific political events (and the famine was a political event: while the potato blight was a real disease, Ireland was *exporting* food abroad. The suffering was human caused) but still, that doesn’t make this particular tragedy less tragic.

Next week the kids will be back in school and I predict I’ll be a bit more productive.

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