Hello blogosphere! I think the last time I posted was right in the middle of covid.
It certainly was before I finished my MA in Applied Linguistics and Teaching English as a Second Language from Iowa State University. Hooray for that accomplishment, lots of back patting here.
It was before I was hired by FamilySearch to work on the Ground Truth Development team, helping Computer Assisted Indexing for Czech genealogy records to actually exist. Which they don’t yet, but the model does. And I built the training data for that model, based largely on, drumroll:
My book! Lukáš Svoboda and I wrote a book called “The Researcher’s Guide to the Czech Land Records”. We transcribed many dozens of land records over the SEVEN (yes seven!) years it took us to write this beast. Thirty are in the book. I counted 768 transcriptions in my arsenal of Czech genealogy transcriptions, including many, many partial transcriptions. Thirty of those are super amazing. And actually, even since then, I learned more that could have improved them. So it’s an iterative thing.
Yeah, and after my contract position ran up, I was hired as a FamilySearch employee intern to fix the Czech metadata problems. I love my boss. I love a lot of things about my job, and also there are some specific elements of it that I find to be extremely challenging.
I should also mention that I had my appendix removed. Apparently I had acute appendicitis for over a year, possibly for years (yes, plural, and yes, acute). I feel much, much better.
I went through a series of extremely unpleasant experiences during grad school that shed light on two additional health issues. One of them is treatable with medication, the other not. It turns out I’ve always had these issues plaguing me, and always will, at least on this earth in this mortal body. I don’t especially think I want to write at length about my health problems here on this blog about Czech genealogy, but obviously they affect every aspect of my life, including my research.
I finished my MA degree and started my PhD. Both of these adventures directly relate to my love of Czech genealogy. My thesis was to build the core vocabulary list for Czech. My PhD, which I am currently working on remotely (oh yeah, we also moved to Orem, Utah!) is to create perceptual phonetic mapping which will help link census spellings by L1 English speakers (e.g. “Saddlerjack”) to probable Czech spellings (e.g. “Sedláček”).
I’ve been actively building my own family tree, taking my family’s names to the temple, attending RootsTech, translating books, speaking at genealogy conferences, etc. etc.
I just haven’t been blogging.
For like, four years.
Sheesh, has it really been that long!?
While at RootsTech this last weekend, I did a little introspection about why I have been so dormant in my online genealogy presence. I made a list of pros and cons, which helped me to see more clearly what precisely are the things that I love about Czech genealogy, and what are the things I just really don’t. It helped me to make the decision to try to come back to it, hence this post. I also decided it would be interesting to share. Or rather, that it would be interesting to write and that I would like to share it. I still have what is perhaps a naive hope that, like so many of my other blog posts, and especially like the original raison d’être of this blog, some soul somewhere out there will read this and find it interesting/useful. I have seen this happen many, many times for many random things, years after the first writing – so why not now with this. It has taken me a lot of mental effort to decide that this hope is worth, ehm… how to say… nurturing? Kindling? Stupidly and stubbornly preserving?
Things I really dislike about Czech Genealogy
(Please keep in mind that these are not necessarily things that are implicit in everybody else’s “Czech Genealogy” experiences. But this is how Czech Genealogy relates to me personally)
- I can’t stand pressure to pretend like I know more than I actually do, but this pressure exists and will never go away because I am not a novice. The pressure is both external and internal. I am pretty good at handling my internal voice – I am also pretty good at admitting when I am wrong about something and moving on. But there is a lot of pressure to be an “expert” when people around you believe you are one. And, to be honest, I am one. I just also painfully know more clearly today how limited my expertise and knowledge actually is, and that there are worlds of knowledge left to obtain, so the role of “expert” sucks. I am unlikely to ever be so expert that I grow out of this feeling – there is SO much to learn, especially about Czech history. The pressure to act like a phony liar and hypocrite is real. I know that sometimes this is called imposter syndrome, but I think it goes a bit beyond that. I think that the experts who I admire the most are actually all in a similar boat, and are freely able to admit the limits of their own knowledge. Frankly, if you can’t this in yourself, you’re probably never going to win my deep admiration and respect, because true scholars are always searching, always thirsting after more knowledge, never satisfied. I can deal with this feeling of never being full, but do I really have to feel hungry but pretend to be stuffed? It’s so… stupid.
- I fear negative feedback. Much more than normal people. It hurts. A lot. As my blog has gotten bigger, it has received more attention. More feedback. The negative feedback is very minimal, but it tends to feed my perfectionistic side, and that is very, very bad. It is a big part of what leads me to not blog.
- There is a wider Czech Genealogy community, and I desperately want to be a part of it. I strongly dislike feeling ignored or like an outsider. I want my voice to be acknowledged. I want people to listen to me. I want to be important in this community. When I don’t contribute to the community, and I see others who do, it tends to lead to stupid comparisons and feelings of jealousy or fear. I hate this. I need to just remember that the reason for blogging about my deep passion is not about getting personal accolades and fame, it is for 1) myself to keep a record of what I’m doing (I have gone back to the “And to the Swedes a fiery hell” blog post about twenty times in the last five years), and 2) to “cast my bread upon the waters” and maybe, someday, somehow, help some one other person out there. That’s it! Keep it in perspective.
- I hate a lot of things about grad school. Almost none of what has been difficult for me in grad school has been academic; all the grad school challenges have had social elements. Czech genealogy doesn’t really align that well with my academic world, even though it is literally the reason I had to pursue advanced degrees. There was no other way to get the knowledge I needed about corpus linguistics, and that knowledge was necessary for me to learn Czech. And Czech is completely necessary for Czech genealogy, because let’s fac it, most of the genealogy problems are linguistics-in-nature, not “we don’t have the records” in nature.
- It turns out that I really dislike sitting at a computer for many hours on end staring at a computer screen and talking to nobody else except my immediate family during the day. I love walking around and talking to people, and crave work that will let me meet new people and talk with them and teach them every single day. In person. The biggest problem for me is that I can get super sucked into Czech genealogy, since it is my primary special interest. This causes me to get major muscle pain in my back and neck and sides, for example, if I end up sitting there for hours and hours on end without breaks. Sigh.
- I dislike running a small business. It’s not fun. It’s exhausting.
- I dislike web design. It’s not fun. It’s exhausting.
- I dislike managing social media to promote myself. It’s not fun. It’s exhausting.
- I hate overpromising and underdelivering. I have literally cancelled almost all non-dissertation related research and writing projects. I am only starting fiber arts related projects (because they don’t hurt my body – they’re so much more movey-aroundy!) – and many of these have something to do with my Czech heritage, obviously 🙂 I guess I also have been doing quite a bit of piano and reading, but these are not the… I mean… There was this one year, I think it was 2023? I presented in literally 20+ academic conferences, including one in the Czech Republic and another in Portugal. None of that for now. And I tend to overpromise on this blog, whether it’s with series that don’t get finished, or trying to monetize or take on small for-pay projects – as the blog got bigger, I tended to raise my own self-expectations and then feel crushed when I couldn’t possibly meet any of my desired deadlines or goals. Although, let’s be fair: the strategy was and has always been for me something more like: start as many possible crazy projects as possible so that even if you can only finish a small handful, you’re still ahead of most people finish-wise. In other words, I probably actually DID finish a lot of things – but that’s not the point. The point is that I don’t tend to feel like I am finishing as much as I want to. So let’s all just take a second to hum the little tune that my mother in law taught me, “When at first you don’t succeed, lower your expectations, lower your expectaaaations!”
- Other things: there are certain people in my Czech genealogy world I don’t like interacting with very much. If it were only the dead people, even if they were jerks while alive, it wouldn’t matter 🙂 Looking at you, Wallenstein.
- It turns out that I don’t much like doing research for beginners. It’s not fun for me. It’s great to have a challenge. I just… I don’t like racing others to answer an easy question. My blog doesn’t fill the same niche that Blanka’s does, and it really never will because I don’t like to exhaustively cover the basics. This is a highly necessary thing for someone to do, and boy am I glad that Blanka does it, ‘cuz that means I can spend lots of other time writing about emphyteusis and weaving patterns for gloves and anything at all related to land records, and even (cringe) the horrifying metadata situation for Czech genealogy records on FamilySearch (much worse than I ever thought it was before I did an audit, guys).
- Sometimes, especially at work, but also using Czech archival websites, the systems and architecture that make it possible to access historical records are depressing to the point of making me literally cry. I get literal nightmares. I scream into my pillow. Sometimes it feels like things will never get better.
But…
Things I love about Czech Genealogy, and why it will always be a core passion for me
- I, me, a fourth generation Texas Czech living four thousand miles away from the Czech lands of my ancestors – I have, can, and will continue to take actions that make Czech genealogy research better. For myself. For others. For our dead ancestors. I work on fixing the metadata. I have fixed over 20,000 incorrectly labeled records, and counting. I work on transcriptions. I created a training set that will be used to help assist full text search models for Czech – which is amazing. Miraculous, even. I didn’t have any resources for it – so I literally co-wrote the book about Czech land records research in English. Basically, I can make an impact for good in this world in this niche area that I find interesting. One of my deepest values is engaging in productive, useful, meaningful, lasting work, and this is an area of my life where I literally can do that every single time I sit at my computer. It is deeply rewarding for me to be able to contribute this way. It feels good!
- Those infinite wells of knowledge mentioned above? I love them – REALLY love them. I have now listened to two audio books about the Thirty Years War – twice! For each! – and the excitement about learning doesn’t ever go away. There’s so much to learn. Infinite worlds of knowledge. Exploring the past, a foreign country – it’s so fun. I love how it feels to learn new things, and the more I learn, the more I learn there is to learn. Kind of like Cimrman’s externism 🙂
- There’s almost nothing that compares to meeting, associating with, and having deep discussions with others about these deeply interesting topics. I have met so many intelligent people in the Czech genealogy world. Many Americans. Many Czechs. Deep friendships. Deep conversations. Deep discussions. Deep research. This is worth it.
- I love to write. I might not love the meta-writing activities, such as blog promotion and stuff like that, but the actual writing part is fun for me. Grad school taught me that I am pretty dang good at academic writing. My blog voice is not the same as my academic voice (it is much more authentic and close to my internal voice, actually – this voice I am using on my blog here and now with you, dear reader) – but I kind of treat academic writing like another language. Both when I write and when I read! More can be written on that at another time.
- As my Czech has improved, I have found deep joy in reading and being able to understand – at least to understand better than used to be the case. For example, I was browsing through some bachelors theses on the topic of the strangely named “Danish fall” on Frenštát in 1626. I found myself reading pages and pages before my understanding muscles started to weaken. I can’t tell you how deeply gratifying it feels to be able to read the books that ten years ago I knew existed but couldn’t. I can still improve, but when the writing is on a topic that I know a lot about, I find that I can often read quite a lot of it! [in case you are wondering, the way that Czechs call this horrific event that literally wiped Frenštát off the Komenius map that came out in 1633 – they call Mansfeld’s army the “Danish army”, while it’s often called the “Imperial army” in German or English sources. He wasn’t Danish, but he was acting under Christian IV, who was. It’s really interesting that through time, Czechs have continued to call this incident the “Danish fall on Frenštát.” Later, in 1646, the town was nearly destroyed again, but this time by the Swedes. Currently, I can only trace one of my ancestors back that far, thanks to research that my fourth cousin did. I hope to eventually trace them all back to the Thirty Years War, if possible!]
- I love presenting at conferences. I love attending conferences and interacting with people in them. I love teaching. These are areas that are super interesting to me, where I have some natural talent. It can be exhausting. But it’s also really fun.
So those are my main list of pros and cons. I currently feel like the pros to continue blogging about Czech genealogy outweigh the cons, so maybe you’ll see more posts from me in the near future? It was never a question about if I would leave the Czech genealogy world altogether – and hopefully you now can see from the beginning of this post that I really haven’t, even if I’ve been publicly somewhat silent the last four years, at least on this particular platform.
Ať žíje naši zesnulí! 🙂