Political Tuesdays: How did we get to this point?

 It was a quiet Saturday in the church fellowship hall, sewing machines humming and ladies talking. I demonstrated how to piece a Jacob's Ladder block, Gail demonstrated how to make a neck cooler to deal with the heat wave, fabrics were displayed and shared. Then someone checked a phone, and announced, "President Trump's been shot!" and the world seemed to shift on its axis.

We saw the instantly iconic photo of Trump, bleeding and raising his fist in the air to reassure and motivate the crowd. There was a discussion of the Secret Service (I shared my personal story, which I'll save for a more lighthearted moment in blogging). We wrapped things up and prayed for Trump and those affected by the shooting. On the drive home I listened to the radio news and observed a troubling repetition: "possible assassination attempt." It was the same when I flipped on the TV at home. ABC was using "possible" as the qualifier of choice. NBC and CBS were also similarly guarded... the language I remember was "apparent gunshots" and "apparent assassination attempt" well over two hours after the event and even the morning after. There was some speculation that it might have been a bb gun, or firecrackers. Fox was the first that actually used plainer language; they called it an assassination attempt, and a shooter, and they were honest about what they didn't know. There was a real fatality, and one wonders how other media outlets planned to spin that. I have nothing but contempt for people and organizations who call themselves journalists but refuse to communicate plainly because it might hurt their favorite candidate.

Regardless of the future, there needs to be, in the security world, an accounting for the lapses that surely contributed to this, and in the media world, an increase in editorial discipline to keep biases from creeping into reporting. Because streaming is everywhere in real time, and false narratives are created for fun and clicks, and the current President is clearly suffering from deterioration in his faculties. I'm old enough to remember the Reagan assassination attempt, and my mother's stories of the Kennedy brothers. I'm also old enough to remember the glory days of the daily newspaper, and reading up on major world events with a reasonable confidence that I was being told the truth by the reporters, to the best of their ability to determine it. Broadcast journalists have a disadvantage; they see the same footage as we do, and they have to keep talking so people will keep watching. But analysis falls by the wayside in a fluid situation, and they usually end up talking to fill empty airtime, and bias creeps in. If you're really that fearful of a lawsuit, it would be better to say nothing and let the images speak for themselves.

Or alternatively, if you are really afraid, so very afraid, that the guy you hate might win because of something you say on air, maybe you should get out of the field formerly known as "journalism."

Genealogy, part I: or, Learning to climb the tree.

 It started mildly enough, a few decades ago. My mother-in-law, a librarian, went to an Elder Hostel at BYU with my father-in-law, and spent the next 4-5 years compiling several binders full of research and pedigree charts for her children and her sons-in-law and daughter-in-law (that's me). My parents, especially my mom, pitched in and came up with notes from my grandparents and great-uncles and aunts, but there weren't a whole lot of mysteries in my family within the last hundred years, and a great-uncle had already written a book about his side of the family, so I didn't think much about it. Eventually the binders came to live with us. They were interesting to leaf through, and wonder if I was really descended from the Plantagenets or if that was just mythology, but I had no way to evaluate it all.

But Mom Chapman never really solved the mystery of her own roots, for all that work. So some years back, Steve got her an Ancestry DNA kit as a gift, maybe for Mother's day. Then he took the test, maybe for his birthday. And by Christmas, or maybe New Years, I took one too. It's a little weird and feels, to this descendant of Puritans (which I already knew) a bit too potentially prideful and self-indulgent to be proper.

But then, a month or two later, when the results came back and had very few surprises (Scottish, English, Northern European, Germanic, and that's pretty much what I expected) I had to laboriously enter my own family tree just to give the database something to work with. I was irritated about how long-ago record-keepers had spelled my ancestors' surnames. And I wasn't willing to pay a subscription fee just to find misspelled records for people I already knew were my ancestors, so I just kept entering the family tree Mom Chapman had so generously researched for me, as well as the lineage recorded in Great-Uncle Everett's Maffett book. On some lines it was easy to get back to the Puritans, or the later English or Scots-Irish settlers in the mid-Atlantic states... but on others, it quickly became confusing and frustrating. Still, I was hooked. I was just curious to go back further in time than 150 years, which had all been pretty well documented for most lines, or find out about the hillbillies, who weren't documented much at all. The gaps in Mom Chapman's notebooks became increasingly tantalizing to me. Who was the father of Zebulon Burch? Who was the father of Martin Burch? Who were the parents of Mercy Rodgers Crouch? Who was Catherine Unknown? Where was Thomas Bogue buried? I still don't have the answers to those questions. But I came to view it all as a grand exploration and quest for knowledge.

Sometimes I'd see something on Ancestry and wonder if the claims made about that person were true, so I'd do a basic Google search, and I started seeing WikiTree profiles occasionally. And I discovered that, basically WikiTree is a vast database of genealogy that you can contribute to. I was in the phase of wanting to learn Markdown formatting for my Wikiversity Latin course (which, I'm sorry to say, I haven't added much to the way I'd hoped), and I just jumped in, and created a profile to try to learn my way around. It involved recreating separate profiles for myself and my family, which was excruciatingly slow at first. And it made me anxious, because you have to have sources, and some people get snooty about what a source is. I could quickly see though, that you could bump into cousins on WikiTree in a more direct way than on other DNA platforms, and I liked that it was free to access and edit. This was in July of 2019. I started adding my family tree, and within a few weeks I'd bumped into two great-great grandfathers who were already on the tree. The adrenaline rush of making a connection in the sea of names and dates was addictive. It was worth the anxiety about whether my research was good enough. Gradually, my confidence grew.

By October of 2019 I had reached back to the early 1800's and late 1700's on some lines, hitting a few brick walls. I signed up for the "source-a-thon" and learned some basic formatting tips for sources that made my profiles look a bit better. 

After that, I stumbled across a book from the late 1800s about the Wagenseller family, which I'm descended from. I ended up creating a profile for all the Wagensellers or Wagonsellers in it who weren't already on the tree. And I was hooked after that.

I'll have more to say about the genealogy quest in future posts. I find it endlessly fascinating in the same way that putting together a quilt or a massive jigsaw puzzle is fascinating.