Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Genealogy Potluck Again!

Randy Seaver is having a stressful time in his life at the moment, so he has made the theme open again this week for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun and sent us out on our own.

GENEALOGY POTLUCK!!

Whatever genealogy fun you want to do — please spend an hour and do it!  Then tell us about it in your own blog post, and leave a comment here which I will add to the Comments after moderation.

Well, I certainly had fun, but it was hard to keep up, and it took a lot longer than just one hour.

This past Wednesday I posted a photo on my blog for Wordless Wednesday:

I then shared the link to my blog post on my Facebook page, as I routinely do.

But this week was different, because the photo generated a thread with more than 200 comments (the last time I counted) among my group of cousins!  The conversation went steadily from Wednesday to this morning.

When we finally had discussed this photo to death (well, we're not entirely finished), some people posted other photos with related people, and then we commented up, down, and sideways on them.  And those discussions helped revise our opinions about this photo.

And among all those comments were so many genealogical tidbits!  Names, dates, family stories.  Every time a new comment went up, I had to chase it down to make sure I didn't miss gleaning new pieces of information.  (Which makes the fact that Facebook is doing a very poor job of sending out notifications when messages have been posted extremely annoying at the moment.)  So I've been compiling all these little factoids and cross-referencing them to make sure the info is as consistent as possible.  I've spent more like four hours just today on it.

And these were very helpful discussions.  The one focused on this photo, for example, entirely changed our hypothesis of who is in the photo.  We started out thinking the women were the four sisters of the family who had emigrated from Europe.  By the time discussion had slowed down, we had come to the conclusion that theory was completely wrong.  We're not sure, but currently we're leaning to the four being the last sister who did emigrate along with the three who did not.  This may have been their last photo together before one of them left.