This and That

Writing a new blog post hasn't been anywhere close to the top of my priority list for the past six to seven weeks. In fact, I haven't blogged regularly since the end of April. The old internal messages of "I should be doing this, or I should be doing that" have been raising their ugly heads every now and then, but I've been able to push them aside with a lot of help from Heidi. So at this point I have no idea when or if I'll get back to writing in my blog on a regular basis again.

I have been working on my family history project. Last week I recruited one of my nieces to assist me in the gathering of information. She is very excited and enthusiastic about doing this because it falls in line with one of her keen interests. (I knew this which is precisely why I invited her to join me in this project).

Over the past while I've been working through old family documents that I have collected. Through this activity I have gained a new admiration for archivists and historians who spend much of their time and energy deciphering the old scripts and languages. Some of the documents I have are almost impossible for me to read. The script is baffling and some of the terminology is no longer in use. On top of that, my ability to read German has withered a bit as a result of not using those skills on a regular basis. I can still read the language, just not as quickly as I did in the past.

I received documents from my maternal grandfather in 1984 and when I asked him to sit down with me and help me decipher the old script, he took a piece of paper and wrote out the alphabet in that script, both upper and lower case. Then he handed me the paper and told me to figure it out myself. Needless to say, that wasn't the kind of help I was looking for. Digging through the file folders of documents I found that piece of paper again.

I've got quite a task ahead of me. The challenge will be to not get frustrated and set the whole thing aside again. Time will tell how I do with that.