by

(tuesday) was a good day

1930 census

I was going to bed Tuesday night after a really nice day of talking to a radio interviewer on the phone, solving a bunch of niggling IT problems at work, teaching one of my drop-in students how to look up folks in the US Census, getting hooked and finding my own relatives in the US Census — I was able to find five out of eight great-grandparents — playing Scrabble with my boyfriend and teaching him to find his relatives in the US Census (Russian immigrants, the lot of them) and going to bed thinking “Hey I solved a lot of problems today and I didn’t set foot in the library once” vowing to actually note down that I’d just had a nice no-illness, no-travel, no-library day in the morning.

And then my website was down for days. I was savvy enough to know that the problem wasn’t mine. Historically, this sort of thing used to happen only when I’d received some major media attention and the outage seemed to be a sort of karmic “don’t get too big for your britches” warning. This time it just seemed like the response of an old teetery webserver — I’m still with eskimo.com and have been since 1996 or so — until I did a little Googling. Looks like the owner of eskimo.com was in prison and major bills went unpaid leaving the site down for days while the family and the remaining employee[s] figured it all out. Eskimo.com refugees took shelter in an Ubuntu forum while they figured out what exactly was going on. I’m still reading the details which are spotty. Looks like a family member has taken over. The site is back up. There’s a Yahoo group that has been started.

Meanwhile my boss Matt — best boss of all time — had a bit of a medical emergency which most of us heard about on Twitter. He’s off to get surgery today. The public announcement of this scary fact resulted in a massive outpouring of sympathy and love from the thousands of people on the internet his life and work have touched. I’m crossing my fingers for a dull and uneventful procedure and a speedy recovery.

So I’m in a decent place, happy and healthy in my pineapple pajamas, but things are pretty bumpy in the larger world. One of the toughest things about this living-in-the-future internet world is that there’s always a larger world where everything’s not quite awesome someplace. Taking the crunchy with the smooth, I suppose.

What do you think?

Comment

  1. Yep, Tuesday was a good day. I spent from 10:30am to 3pm in a library going through microfilm for obits and wedding articles. Trying to construct my son-in-law’s family tree. This was my second stint there and there are probably at least a couple more in my future. I get hooked on research and can’t stop. Help!!! LOL

    Enjoy both your blogs.

  2. While there are goofups and inconsistencies in the censuses, they’re a HUGE repository of great info. Having them available online and perusable from home makes it easy to spend more time and discover some of the little things that bring all those dead relatives to life. I found families of their future spouses living near some of my ancestors–gives some insight into how they all met. Also found out that my very austere and forbidding grandma was known as Josie when she was a little girl.