#52Ancestors: Loss

 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 12  (Mar 22-28)
Prompt: Loss
#52ancestors

It has been awhile since I posted anything. Life and work displaced genealogy for awhile.  Yesterday I presented a program at the TXGenWeb Virtual Seminar and the seminar has inspired me to take my time back and start writing again. I want to go back and write about all the prompts that I've missed so I'm going to add some empty posts to keep them in order.  I'm going to be patient with me as I get caught up and continue on. I hope you will be too.

The prompt for March 22-28th was Loss and I am feeling the loss right now of time spent in different ways.  I have been doing genealogy research for over 40 years off and on. In the beginning it was often only a couple of times a year when I had time to travel to the downtown library in Dallas or time to write a few letters to courthouses in far away places.  Now those places don't seem so far away when I can jump on the computer at 10 o'clock at night and search the street view of Google or find an index of courthouse records available or search one of the big database websites, like ancestry.com, familysearch.com, or the USGenWeb Project. 

While I'm feeling the loss of time over the last few months due to a reorganization at work and the knowledge that in the Fall I will no longer be working on the El Centro campus, I am thinking of the loss that our ancesters must have felt when they immigrated or moved from one place to another.  They didn't have email to keep in contact with friends and family that were left behind. Letters didn't take 3 or 4 days to arrive. Sometimes letters traveled months to reach their destination.  Even close family eventually lost contact.  Now we keep in contact with email, FaceBook, Tumbler, Instagram, and other social media. 

 One of the ways that I keep in contact and try to bridge the gap between the past and the present is with this blog. That may be one of the reasons that I feel a sense of loss for not posting over the last few months.  Perhaps I'll do better in the future, but either way I plan to be patient with myself.