Har du gjort din slekt historien?

No, don't worry, it's still my blog, and it's still in English. :) I have to admit that two of my biggest hobbies right now have to involve Family History work. Of course, I still remember when we referred to it as Genealogy...I think they changed it because it was hard to spell...hehehe. Just kidding of course.

Anyway, the title says, Have you done your family history? I thought of it, well, plugged it into my little Norwegian/English translator, and there it was. I was getting ready to start working on my Norwegian extraction assignment, and decided to blog first.

Anyway, I don't know what it is about Family History, but I've definitely been bitten by the family history bug. I think it's because I didn't realize how EASY it is! And, since I'm a data entry nerd, it is fun for me to input information into little boxes.

There are three main family history things that I work on...

1. Norwegian extraction...here I get assignments from a person who is working on the Norwegian Extraction Project (except he has a degree and goes to SLC once a week...in other words, he gets paid). Anyway, once on my computer I open up my PAF program, which is very easy to run, and input information from images that I have downloaded from the project. I find it fascinating to find out information about families that lived in Norway some time ago. (before 1900).

2. Indexing...this is done on the internet, very easy, and also interesting to me. Almost anyone can do this! I think it's my fixation with names. It's always interesting to me to see what names were most common when. The popularity of a name changes depending on what part of the US the people were living in too. I was very surprised to find the names, Austin and Harley, for example, as first names on census records dating before the 1900's. These names weren't one time entries either! So, anyway, it's very intriguing.

3. Of course I work on my own family genealogy too! Basically it's just filling in the holes. It's a lot of information, and very time consuming. When I get going on filling in the holes, believe me, the time flies by! So, I have to be careful, or literally could spend the whole day at the computer. Of course that's never happened before!