From Randy Seaver's Genea-musings, here is tonight's challenge.
Tonight's rules:
How much genealogy and family history
work do you do, on average, each week? What tasks do you routinely
perform every day, every month, every year?
Share your genealogy life in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or on Facebook or google+.
These days, my family genealogy has taken a back seat to my work as a historian, researching the people and families of St. Augustine, Florida, during the Second Spanish Period (1784-1821). I am taking a historical and genealogical approach to my subject. Most days, I am still translating the marriage permission petitions filed by people who did not have qualified relatives in St. Augustine or nearby who could grant them the required permission to marry. I have finished the rough translations, the first pass-through, and am now working on the smooth translations. They are about halfway done.
This project will, I hope, be published in a book. That will probably come in a year or two. The book will include these translations, commentaries on them based on the law that was in force at the time, how these petitions reflect the implementation of that law in St. Augustine, extracts from the actual marriage records from the Catholic diocese, and background and discussion of the law. Most of the latter will be drawn from my master's thesis.
The book is part of my effort to delve into the relationships between the various ethnic or national groups that made up St. Augustine at that time. Work has been done on the Minorcan population of St. Augustine, and the African-American population, and the British, and the Spanish, but no one has really inquired into how these groups interacted and were inter-related. That is what I hope to accomplish, and it will probably span several books.
I have just upgraded my Legacy genealogical software, which I will be using to enter the data I am gathering on the people of St. Augustine during the subject period. I think Legacy will help greatly in analyzing these data.
I have also done some translation work on old Spanish documents for a couple of clients, though I usually do not do client work. One also, however, does not turn away such paying work when it lands in one's lap!
I have already amassed two file cabinets full of dossiers on people who lived in St. Augusting during the Second Spanish Period. I characterize myself as the J. Edgar Hoover of old St. Augustine!
So my own family history has languished in the process.
