Why Patsy’s Paddocks? I do like alliterations and I’ve always known fields as paddocks. Following Victorian land selections is one way of following my family history and this has often meant following the history of paddocks I rode across as a kid. Who was the elusive William Campbell of Campbell’s paddock? Why was Farie spelt that way? Paddocks are also confining. A reminder to keep my mind focused on the current research. Not let my mind wander. This resolve has blown apart these last two weeks. The autumn leaves have been picked up and scattered by the leaves. The cemetery list looks like a random walk through the years.
First. Thank you Alan Phillips for organising the conference. Timing it over the break between the AFL Home and Away season and the Finals was brilliant. I only have a few days now to fret about Geelong’s fragility around Finals.
Thank you Ancestry. A session that had its difficult part but handled calmly and professionally. Well done.
Thank you Blaine for lasting the distance. The Visual Phasing presentation was excellent. But I remain scarred by believing a couple of years ago a salesman’s pitch that Chromsome 22 was the place to start. It wasn’t. Nor was Chromosome 21. Nor was Chromosome 20. Just as well there were 23 chromosomes to practice on.
It occurred to me in preparing for this conference that those little black boxes called genealogy software and where mischievous gremlins reside are also paddocks of a kind. I open the gate and push information in. It’s sometimes like pushing old ewes through a gate that wasn’t there yesterday. It may take a while to get the input in the format before its accepted but mostly it works. I close the input gate and open the output gate. And suddenly I have created a report or something pretty:
- a Family Group Report
- a family chart or two or more
- a Y700 Block Tree
- a completed Visual Phasing Spreadsheet & accompanying DNA Painter chart and/or
- a clusters chart leading into a Network chart
But my Legacy program can’t cope with all of that. Or can it? Should it?
I can argue a case that a family chart is a special instance of a network.
But I don’t think I want to do that. Remember. I like paddocks. I like compartments.
My family software is settled. My understanding of it is settled. I shall leave it be.
My DNA moves faster than I can keep up. I want to keep it in its own pen in the sheep yard until I am comfortable with it. Which won’t be any time soon. Because there is so much to think about, absorb, rearrange, revisit and catalogue as a consequence of DNA Down Under.