Beyond the Guild Blog Challenge

I am very grateful to Corinne for initiating the Guild Blog Challenge, and to Melody for setting up the associated Facebook Group, in order to encourage Guild members to start, or restart, blogging about their studies.  It was tough to get all my ten posts completed before the end of March, but I did manage it, thanks to a last minute dash at the end.

For many of us, the Challenge definitely served as a motivator and prompted us to stop putting off publishing information from our research.  And it is great that the Group will keep going, enabling anyone who hasn't yet completed the Challenge to do so, as well as encouraging us all to continue blogging.

The question for me, though, is exactly how to continue.

The Challenge reminded me of several 'conclusions' that I knew anyway, ie
1. That the Guild's main asset is the members, who are encouraging and supportive,
2. That words are not my forte - but that regular writing, and reviewing what I am going to post, does help to improve it. (well, I think it does - maybe any readers were just too polite to tell me what they really thought 🙂 )

The Challenge also highlighted some issues I need to improve on - for example, finding relevant photographs, or pictures, to illustrate a post.

Coming back to the study after a few years of very little planned research, the Challenge also helped to clarify what it is that I would like to achieve with the PARRY Study - which I have realised relates more to the 'bigger picture' about the data - frequencies, distributions, change rates etc - rather than the minutiae of individual family trees or stories.  Perhaps I shouldn't make such a confession but I don't (often) find other people's family history interesting.  I'm not a 'story' person.  Occasionally something might 'grab me' about a particular individual or family, but I have enough trouble keeping up with all the information on my own ancestors and their descendants, without trying to go into that much detail for all of the other PARRYs!   

There were definitely times over the last few months when I felt 'bogged down' by not getting something done on time - to the extent, at one point, I even considered deregistering the surname!  Examples of posts not completed include analysing the Norfolk records, which I'd extracted early on, also some records for Cumbria that had been mentioned as being on Family Search and which, like the Norfolk records, turned out to involve more than just a simple extraction task, because of the way the records are organised.

When I look back at my third post, "The state of the study. And some Norfolk records". and consider the extent to which the Study moved forward on those three 'big issues' over these months, I would have to answer, "it didn't."

Somewhere in there, is perhaps a hint about why some of us have problems with regular blogging, which is easiest to illustrate by comparing the difference between the impression given in WDYTYA! programmes and 'real research'.

Whenever the WDYTYA! series is on, with the celebrity walking into Registry Offices, or local Archives, and almost immediately coming out with the right piece of information to enable them to move on to the next stage of their journey, there is a chorus of comments from family historians that "real research isn't like that", that it takes time, and that sometimes hours of work produce very little reward (except the 'value' of negative searches, or course!  🙂)

The programme is designed to make a good story - and I think that's what I found myself trying to achieve with my posts.  So I ended up doing research in order to write a post (and which therefore has a need to be 'finished'), rather than writing a post as a result of the research I'm doing anyway (where it doesn't matter if the research isn't finished - such a post is still a record of how the study is progressing.)

So, moving forward, there's likely to be a change in the type of posts I write, with more of the "weekly update" style.  I think that's better than reducing the frequency of posts. 

Fundamentally, the PARRY Study blog has to encourage progress on the PARRY study.  If I happen to occasionally produce an interesting story as a result of that, that will be great - but I'm going to try not to let that become my focus, as it reduces the chances of me publishing anything!