Tangents

Tangents

Tangents are mathematically important but I'm not talking about those tangents. I'm referring to the red herring type of tangent where the topic is almost unrelated to the main topic but has a point in common with it. In other words you are nicely going along one path, get distracted and going off on a tangent yet both the original path and tangent are somehow related. Now tangents can be either beneficial, neutral or bad. At best they lead to discovery and at worst they are time wasters.

The past week has been full of tangents. My husband left for hunt camp leaving me with a whole five days to do exactly as I pleased and I fully intended to spend as much time on genealogy and my book. Two of those days were spent in such discomfort that there was little room for intellectual output and the last three weren't much better. Over those two days I started reading The Hundred Year Lie by Randall Fitzgerald that almost immediately sent me off on a couple of tangents. Then flipping the tv channels late at night I came across a program with a similar theme that our food is killing us and how much food had changed from our ancestors times. The following day brought me back to analyzing the Agricultural Census of my second great grandparents.

This is an extremely interesting couple as they died within a month of each other leaving eight children under the age of 13. The youngest son died a couple of months later leaving my great grandfather the baby of the family at a ripe old age of 2. It is still a mystery as to where these kids lived as they simply disappear from the following census then some start reappearing on the next census. And just as I typed that last sentence an idea I had not considered before popped into my head! I had made the assumption that some type of illness had gone through the family causing the demise of the parents and infant son. I should know better than to make assumptions when it comes to genealogy! My second great grandmother died nine days after giving birth so her death is much more likely to be due to complications from childbirth. So now after this entry is posted I will be off on another tangent.

The information on this census is amazing as a lot of what kinds of foods were stored were noted. They lived very near the water as within less than a 5 minute walk in a location about thirty minutes from where I live. The interesting thing about this was they had no fish stored in barrels as their neighbours did! My question is why? Food was food then and people ate what was available and when you lived by water that naturally meant fish. Now I'm heading in the right direction even though it was in a round about way except in comes another tangent followed by another.