In her blog entry on Ancestry.Com, Jeanie Croasman wrote:

I hated history in high school, a fact that seems absurd to me today since now I’m surrounded by it. But back then, history was just a bunch of names and dates and events that had no impact on me whatsoever. Or so I thought.

Age does funny things to you. Gravity aside, it’s also helped me realize just how much I was personally affected by those events we studied in school. For example, I was always told that my great-grandfather left Austria-Hungary to avoid conscription. What I didn’t know until I started checking dates was that World War I was the bigger trigger.

How true. Perhaps, it’s the education system that makes history boring, not that history is itself boring. That’s besides the point. What’s interesting is the little tip in crafting one’s genealogy – to place everything in a timeline – both personal and the historical – and you might just see the context in which your family history is played out.

Doing this, you’ll see that we don’t just exist in a vacuum, but that there are interesting things that happened around us, and the impact on our private lives, great or small.

These historical events provide an interesting backdrop against which we see our family history. But I’d be careful not to write ourselves into history – making every link no matter how tenuous. This is unless, of course, you have family members directly involved – such as being a wartime commanding officer or leader of a country.

Charting your family timeline is probably a good start to that family history project you’ve been putting off for so long.

Came across this article at Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter about the Canadian city of Calgary has decided to replace cemetery headstones with GPS as grave markers instead. So, instead of looking for one’s beloved as inscribed in headstones, all one need is a hand-held GPS locator which will tell you the spot your loved on is buried in.

With the cemeteries getting full, this is a new strategy to deal with “overcrowding”.

Casting aside issues of environmental friendliness, would not colobariums be a more “dignified” way of dealing with overcrowding? While memories are not inscribed in stones and other material beings, surely having a marker of somewhat more permanence be a better option than a GPS tag?

Perhaps the need for permanence and visible markers are more for the living than the dead.

This CNN article – Technology helps unearth family trees – highlights the more time-consuming effort of tracing one’s family tree – DNA testing.

One of Singapore’s more prolific geneaologists, Kevin Sheperdson, is featured in the article.

Those who are not keen on subscription-based genealogy websites may find this list of free sites interesting. These sites are, however, Western oriented. Those searching for information relating to the non-Western world may be frustrated. But an interesting list to have, nevertheless.