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What do you struggle with in your research?

I’m not certain it really impacts things and it may be a stretch to say it’s a “struggle,” but I tend to imagine the ancestors I didn’t know as older and having always been older. My parents are for some reason stuck in their mid-30s (that’s probably my first real solid memories of them) and my grandparents (the three that I knew) are remembered the same way (ranging from 50 to 70 depending on how old they were when I was born).

Of course I knew them when they were older. But now that they are gone, they seem to have migrated to those ages in my mind. Memory is a funny thing. Maybe that’s because I wish I was still a child.

But seriously among the things I try and think about when analyzing a record or working on a person during a certain time period is how old they were at that point in their life and where they were in their lifespan at that point–young adult, newly married, young children, etc. Those things matter.

Because no one is old their entire life and we can’t go back to our childhood.

–Michael

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