Darrel is not dead!

In fact, I am very much alive! Alive! Whenever I don’t write for awhile, it’s usually because all sorts of things are going on and blogging simply loses priority. Hopefully, all my readers have had the sense to subscribe to my RSS feed, rather than dropping by to be disappointed repeatedly.

So, what’s been happenin’? Well, let’s start by saying I turned 30 and got rootsy. Actually, I’ve always been quite rootsy, but I recently began doing some genealogical research and have been shocked, amazed, and very nearly moved to tears by how much I’ve discovered. For my friends who can’t stand to hear anymore about this, please go here and learn something useful in the time you were going to spend reading and commenting here.

Unbeknownst to me, there’s this huge online genealogy community out there who make their data available. In short, I found someone who had done a huge database of South Louisiania families and my great-great-grandparents were one of his endpoints. Through the message boards on Ancestry.com, I met an in-law of a long-lost relative who provided me with a great deal of the data he’d collected while visiting Louisiana court houses and Parish records archives. Yet another long-lost relative provided me with a great deal of information that got me over a brick wall I had hit. Some lines go back over 20 generations!

The result is this site I’ve setup with my family tree.

That site doesn’t have all the data, but I do have a full database that has full families included, so it’s possible to chart relationships between two people in the database. I managed found a link between my maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother. Granted, it was four generations back and lots of people sisters married other people’s brothers whose mother’s were someone’s sister-in-law… No incest, naturally, but the ability to take in all of this visually is really quite spectacular.

So, yeah, I’ve been doing genealogy and it’s fun and cool and I love it. All this has gotten me interested in the history of how all these people ended up where I am today. What was there story? What’s mine? These are all questions that have been burning inside me and have made me, once again, reflect on my upbringing and the culture I grew up with and how important those things are to me.

While growing up, I always lamented that no one spoke French in my family anymore. My great-grandma Emma was the last person who didn’t speak English and when she died, so did a little bit of history. I’ve been wanting to do work in language revitalization for quite some time and it shocked me that doing it for French in Louisiana had never once occurred to me while riding llamas and knitting their wool in the Andes while speaking Quechua did. I wonder if my time in California will cause me to end up living on a Cajun commune deep in the Atchafalaya…

I’ve been reading some books by some gentlemen who are fast becoming role models, particularly Carl Brasseaux and Barry Ancelet, to give myself a Cajun Studies primer. I’m filling in a lot of blanks, to say the least.

This all means it’s time to revive the school thing since I now have a reason to do so. I’ll be doing a night class and hopefully an online one in the spring semester. Why nights and online, do you ask? I got a job! I love the work and it’s not full of crazy people who make each other’s lives hell like other places I’ve worked. I hope they love me long time.

So that’s the brief version of what’s going on… now subsequent posts won’t sound so random. Thanks for reading!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 11:46 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.