The almost-meditative monotony of “Browse”*
Sunday with genealogy and the laptop.
* Browse — as in “browse images of census records.”
I’ve scanned the LDS collection of the 1890 Census of Union Veterans and Widows of the Civil War for three or four counties of Wisconsin and three counties of Ohio so far this weekend. It’s almost like spending time accomplishing something.
Actually, I found myself wondering if this page after page of scanning for a familiar surname, the rote copying of the soldier’s record onto a pad and fitfully considering how I’m going to compile this record in a way that might be useful, was a real, actual, productive use of my genealogy research time.
Shortly after wondering that, I realized that my wandering mind was a quiet murmur of disconnected ideas, memories, mental pictures … kind of like I used to experience while mowing Dorothy Wooden’s lawn for clothes money when I was 14 years old. It’s not really a meditative state. I feel no closer to cosmic realization for having indulged fifteen hours of my life flipping through hundreds of grainy, grey images of 120-year old handwriting. But it is a comforting routine that holds the promise of some fine nugget of historical gold, though this weekend’s exercise yielded no new riches.
I thought I was getting a sense of the national-origin mix of the upper Midwest at the end of the 19th century. It seemed to me that more English (versus Scotch-Irish and German) were in the stew by the fin de siècle. The English, and other northern European, Welsh, and what-not. That the melting pot of America (and perhaps a more mobile, railroad-enabled populace) was well on its way to working its “assimilation” magic by 1890 seemed evident. Of course, that’s just anecdotal. I just have the earliest rosters of property owners in and around old Trumbull County from before 1820 to compare.
The whole question of whether taking a mental break from life in order to “browse” census scans is a good use of my time, much less productive, is for a later day. Right now I have “fun with spreadsheets” to get into and make me think I’m being “creative”. (Ha-ha.)
