It's Monday, which means it's time to offer up the fruits of my weekend brainstorming session. Which only sort of happened. But here goes. This blog is now officially about anything that is even remotely related to public history and public history research. I'm particularly interested in genealogy and architectural history, as well as the sort of thing they do on History Detectives - looking for the provenance of a particular object. Some of it will be about my own family history, while some of it will be about the research process, or anything else regarding public history that I happen to think interesting on a particular day. Wednesday will be family story day. I'll offer up a bit of my own family's past - the more interesting bits, I hope - to entertain and enlighten my dear readers. So that's it.

So for today's genealogy bit.... This weekend I checked two books out from my local library. First, a basic genealogy book on how to get started with your research. The fact is, though I've done lots of archival research looking up other people's history, I've never done what I would consider actual genealogy research. So I thought I'd start with this very basic book. Second, The Great Republic by Sir Winston Churchill. My boyfriend recently expressed surprise that I would be interested in being a historian of any sort because I have no interest in history. That is not true. What I have no interest in is memorizing dates, or, history as it is taught in our public schools today. Sir Winston is thus going to help me fill in the gaps in my American history knowledge.

As I mentioned above, I've been watching a lot of PBS's History Detectives lately. I even added it to my DVR recordings, which I almost never do. I don't like to have too many television shows to watch because it keeps me from doing other things. But History Detectives is great. It's reminded me how very much I loved the archival courses I took in grad school, especially the course in recognizing forgeries! Watching the show motivates me to get back to this thing that I so wanted to do then. My problem was that I didn't want to be an archivist - I wanted to do archival research. And at the same time I thought I wanted to work with kids, so I changed my focus to Public Library Children's Services, despite the wonderful mentor I had in the Archival field. Looking back I wish I hadn't done that, but at the time it really felt like the right thing for me. So now here I am three years later trying to squeeze my way back into the archives by doing public history. I just hope I can make the time to get in there, and not just think and write about it.