What is it all about? What is it that you think of about time? How do you spend your time? We live in time but what is it?
The dictionary definition of time from Oxford Languages states: “1. The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. 2. A point of time as measured in hours and minutes past midnight or noon.”
Lines.
Here I am sitting in a moment, of time. You, the reader, in another. As I write, I fill an empty line of my writing pad. This pad has blue lines all evenly spaced on a page. You, the reader, do not see any of this in your time.
In Another Time.
When we gather the information to construct our family tree, we are looking at documents from another time. We see different handwriting.
We see words written in “another” time where some of these words meant something different in today’s meaning. what it means today. However, thinking of this, in the future our words may mean something different.
Does this fit the above definition of the progression – past, present, future?
Timeline.
Within our short time on this planet, we make discoveries relating to where and who we have come from. Through our research, we find out details from years ago, some even centuries. As I’ve said previously, I do not collect names, dates, or places. I collect information from points in time.
I create a picture of these events that is just a small part of a bigger picture. All family historians are doing the same. The snippets in time build the story of where and who we came from to who we are now. Now the future is to behold.
We, as the storyteller, create these moments in time. These moments are filled with what we know about the past, to bring it to the present and into the future. Our stories create these moments in time that bring us closer to those who came before us in building this world.
Old Records.
Digging into the time from the past tells us a lot more than what we can ever imagine. What we have to look at is: What else was occurring at the time our ancestors were in a particular place.
Information is recorded by governments, newspapers, and even the church. Think about newspapers as written records of gossip in print. All other gossip relates to hearsay which is not recorded.
Churches gathered information from birth through to death and all the things that happened in between these two points were recorded.
Digital Age.
In our present, information is collected by so many more places than our ancestors. Every time you make a purchase there is a receipt – paper, digital, and a lot of the time both.
All the information being collected, “helps” an organisation “predict” possible outcomes. This is best looked at when you purchase a grocery item: it is recorded along with every purchase in that store, then added to your location, your state, and your country. This is happening nearly everywhere in the world. Data collected over time is a big resource. Does it help you? It may, and it may not. I’ll let you be the judge of that.
Ponder on this for now. Until next time…
Explore and Discover.
Acknowledgements:
All photographs above are taken from Pexel.
Ancestor Family 
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