Hi!
As you may have
noticed, I took an unplanned year-long break from blogging this year. During my blogging absence, I dealt with some
physical and mental health things, some stressful career (day job) stuff, and some stressful church
board and committee stuff, and helped organize my parent’s 60th
wedding anniversary party. Now, at the close of the year, I see that taking a year off
blogging (however unintended) helped a lot. The 60th anniversary party weekend has been had and
was a success. I’m in therapy for the mental health things and although it’s not
remotely easy, it’s helping. Additionally, while the physical health things are painful,
tiring, and chronic, my doctors and I are looking into possible different
treatments and diets, and, the treatment of the mental health things may
eventually help the physical health things too. The more proactive treatment of
my mental and physical health is also helping with the work stress, too. And,
as of January 14, I will be off of the church board and the church finance
committee for the first time in four years, which I hope
will give me more energy.
Although I haven’t been blogging, I’ve still been
researching my family tree. I’ve been exploring branches on my Mom’s paternal
side which has led into an area of history I’d never really studied or read about
before, other than a few paragraphs on the formation of Pennsylvania (which
my ancestors don’t stay in). So, I’ve been doing a lot of reading trying to learn it
well enough to explain it and our family’s place in it, and I got stuck in an
attack of perfectionism and anxiety regarding getting it right when writing it up which contributed to no actual writing getting done. Then recently, I
saw a quote from Dr. Jenn Hardy that broke the freeze, “It doesn’t have to be
perfect for it to be finished.” I’m trying to learn to embrace the concept of
“good enough” and just write. So, I will be blogging again next year. However, I’m not going to make any resolutions
on how many posts per week or per month as I don’t want to put any deadline
pressure on myself this year.
I’ve reviewed the branches I’ve been researching and I
think I’ll be writing posts on eight or nine of people in these branches before moving on to do
further research on Mom’s maternal side. But, unlike most family history
stories this one doesn’t want to be told going back a generation at a time. It
wants to be told from the top down to join the parts I’ve already written (it
makes the social history parts easier to write). Accordingly, I had to get back to a person who
felt like a beginning, and I’m now there. I’ll be starting in January with my
9th great-grandfather, George Harlan, who emigrated to this continent about one
hundred years before the U.S. Constitution was ratified. It's outlined, but not written yet, so it will likely go up after next weekend.
But first I’m going to do a post (hopefully to go up on New
Year’s Day) explaining some important (and interesting!) things about the
change in the calendar before and after 1752, and in particular in the Quaker
calendar, because it will help to understand this as we go through the next
several posts and, rather than having to explain it each time it’s relevant,
this way I’ll explain it once and just link to this post in later posts, where
you can read it again if you need to.
May your 2020 be a better year than your 2019 was!
