News and Genealogical Research For Byrne & Asimov Lines
I was a chubby kid. Borderline fat. From around age 3 until puberty, when I shed baby fat like a discarded chrysalis, my annual visits to the pediatrician recorded height in the 50th percentile, while weight rarely dipped much below the 75th percentile. These stats are stated with great certainty,… Read more“The simpler times and pleasures in my mother’s letters”
My 10th gr-grandmother measured penises with broom handle. In the 1630s. It’s on Wikipedia, so it must be true, right? But this one’s been well-documented by other historians, so I tend to believe it’s not a complete fabrication. Genealogy reveals some strange things about what constitutes fame. When people find… Read more“The broom handle and the traitorous china”
Genealogy applications and software have gotten a little boring lately. With all the fascinating technologies surrounding data visualization, machine learning, and otherwise, most people choose the path of least resistance and hand their data over to Ancestry.com. And while Ancestry has some interesting visualizations for family trees and relationships, the… Read more“Visualizing my family’s migration”
Reviewing the traffic stats for this site is like taking a trip around the world. From Iran to Russia, and all over Asia, visitors flow in from around the globe. What are they looking for? A review of security logs indicates roughly 99% are looking for holes to hack and… Read more“Welcoming the 1% (who aren’t trying to hack this site)”
Every family has secrets. Lots of them. Entire lifetimes can be colored by efforts to keep criminal records a secret, hide out of wedlock births, or bury marriages that ended unhappily. And in some cases, those secrets are maintained by subsequent generations, with only the occasional whisper between those in… Read more“Was my gr-gr-grandfather George Austin legitimate?”
Ah, the siren song of shortcuts. Who can argue with wanting a faster way to get from Point A to Point B? Shortcuts shave effort, improve efficiency, and enable us to get more done in less time. They make life so much easier. Until they don’t. Recently I’ve been haunted… Read more“Why to avoid shortcuts with sources”
I’ve been spending more time with a camera this past year, and less time doing genealogy research and website additions. This wasn’t a conscious decision, more a byproduct my professional time in 2013 and 2014 being consumed by development of a new website and CMS for my firm, GreenBiz, making… Read more“A picture of my predecessors (and me)”
Dead and long forgotten. I have a soft spot for those who led interesting, meaningful lives, but for one reason or another never got much attention from other researchers. Often it’s because they fall into the category of d.s.p. (descessit sine prole; died without issue). With no descendants to carry… Read more“Levi Austin’s fleeting wealth quickly washed away”
Sally Byrne had been my mother-in-law for less than three years when she died suddenly and too soon on April 18, 2006 at age 68. But in the seven years we’d known each other, we spent many pleasant hours chatting in her Palo Alto living room over cookies and coffee…. Read more“A Valentine’s Day card to my mother-in-law”
Gathering data online is my primary research activity these days, but there’s something special about holding a historic book, letter or photograph in your hands. This was brought home to me recently when I revisited a stash of letters from my grandparents and great grandparents. I had glanced at them several… Read more“I have known good people: Henry Felix Kloman”