Ben Crowder

For a while I’ve been meaning to take my journals (I always called them logs, probably after Star Trek, but that could be confused with the logs in /var/logs, so we’ll call them journals) and make them accessible to me wherever I go. The gDrive still hasn’t launched, however, so in the meantime I’ve uploaded them to my server and added an index:

(“By Box” is because they’re mostly by the computer I wrote them on.) 1.9 million words. That’s a lot. From 2000-2002, and from 2004 to March 2006, these logfiles were my main journals. (Before 2000 I had a paper journal; 2002-2004 I was on my mission; and since March I’ve been writing in a paper journal again.)

The nice thing now is that I can get to them from anywhere. Eventually I’ll digitize my paper journals and get them up as well. Then I’ll have an off-site backup in case there’s a fire or earthquake or something here. That’s a good thing.

Enough blogging today. :)

[tags]journals[/tags]

I’ve been listening to some Loreena McKennitt music lately, and also reading C.S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces (which takes place in a barbaric country on the border of ancient Greece, basically). More than ever before, I’ve been struck by one thing:

Ancient Greece is dry to me.

Or conversely, my soul of souls is Celtic. (British in the older sense.) I don’t really know quite how to explain this; Tolkien strikes at the deepest part of my heart, but books like Till We Have Faces are dry, gritty, and rather uninteresting to me. I just don’t care for old Greece. (And this coming from someone who has studied Attic Greek.) I feel the same towards Rome, but Latin was used in Britain and so it has a special place in my heart.

Geographically, forests and brooks and hills — the topography of Britain, really — is like a juicy apple to me, but whatever’s down there in Greece and Rome is comparatively dull. I don’t mean that there aren’t forests and brooks and hills there, of course, but there’s some kind of substantial difference. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Britain feels more…green? I don’t know. I wonder if this is due to my culture/upbringing, and if so, which parts. (Do those in the Middle East feel for the desert what I feel for the woods?)

Let me quickly add that this is primarily an attitude toward the past, not toward the cultures of the present. And it doesn’t mean I don’t want to study ancient Greece or Rome; it’s just that they don’t interest me nearly as much as Celtic Britain. Here’s a rough ranking:

1. Britain
2. Russia
3. Spain
4. The North (Scandinavia and Germany and such)
5. Middle East/Persia
6. Africa
7. South America
8. Ancient Greece/Rome/Etruscans/Hittites/Sumerians etc.
9. Native America
10. Asia

Again, this doesn’t mean I have anything against Greece or Rome or Native America or Asia. It’s just an attempt to figure out these built-in predilections towards Britain and perhaps uncover why they’re there. (Or at least be able to define them.) And so far I’m not doing so well. :)

Maybe it has to do with one’s ancestry. Half of my lines come from Britain, so that could very well be it. But I’m a quarter Italian and thus almost assuredly have Roman ancestry, and yet I don’t feel towards Rome the way I do towards England and Wales and Ireland and Scotland.

Having written all this out, I still don’t feel like I’ve gotten any nearer the heart of the issue, other than establishing that I really, really like Britain and I don’t care so much for Rome or Greece. And I already knew that! ~sigh~ I suspect this is one of those posts that ought to be filed away for future revision, but oh well. Maybe one of you will have words of wisdom to share. :)

And now for something different. Here’s a poem I wrote back in August, by the way, entitled “Silver Tresses.”

Silver tresses wink with smile of years, A life of joy, a road of tears, Wrinkles left from worried fears, Golden mem’ries, friendships dear. A cloudless window opens, clear, And He’s near, very near.

Earlier this evening I called my grandmother to wish her a happy birthday. I’d only intended to talk for five or ten minutes, but I’d been reading Rumors of War (a novel by Dean Hughes set in the first couple of years of WWII) and realized that Grandma had lived during that time. So I asked her about it and I ended up listening to her tell me stories about her life for a full hour, all the while I busily scribbled down notes as fast as I could manage. Ended up with six 3×5″ notebook pages, which I then transferred in 7pt handwriting :) to my genealogy Moleskine, and just now I wrote up the more interesting bits and e-mailed them off to my family.

This is addicting. :)

You’d think that the lives of ordinary people wouldn’t be all that interesting, but it’s quite the opposite. Everyone has stories. And stories are good. For example, here’s how she heard about Pearl Harbor:

When she was 13, she always went to the movies on the weekend with her sister, since the theater was only two blocks away and the movies cost only 35 cents. On December 7th, 1941, she and her sister got out of a movie just as it was getting dark. Ordinarily there were lots of people outside, but on this night the streets were deserted. The two girls got home and found their mother sitting in the dark in front of the radio. “We’re at war,” she told them.

Fascinating stuff, really. Sure, she’s my grandmother, but I think the interest level of stories like this doesn’t have as much to do with relation as you’d think. Or at least the stories have enough intrinsic interest that you can be intrigued by someone else’s story even if they’re not a relative.

I love stories. A lot. So now I’m going to go finish reading Rumors of War because I’ve only got 30 pages to go and I’ve got to find out how it ends. :)

Spent an hour talking with my grandmother on my mom’s side (it was her birthday). I hadn’t planned on more than five minutes, actually, but I’d been reading Dean Hughes’ book Rumors of War (which takes place at the beginning of WWII) and realized that my grandma was alive during the war. So I asked her what it was like for her, and ended up with six pages of notes about not only the war but also how she met my grandfather, and how her sister and brother died. And how her great-grandparents had owned a produce business and one of their delivery boys was Frank Sinatra (who had grown up five miles away). Family history is cool. :)

I decided a couple of weeks ago that I’d be much more motivated to do genealogy if I had a Moleskine notebook devoted solely to that pursuit, so I got one but didn’t start using it till today. Copied in those six pages of notes and it’s great. I’ve got to talk to my grandparents more often so I can capture all these memories before they disappear. (It’s also kind of nice going back to paper and pen, incidentally. I can carry the notebook with me in my pocket wherever I go, and it’s durable and wonderful for this sort of thing. It’s the kind of notebook that Indiana Jones’s dad uses in The Last Crusade, too. ;))

[tags]World War II, family history, Moleskine, Indiana Jones[/tags]

I was reading along in Sir Orfeo for my Middle English class earlier today when I came across these lines:

Þer were trompours and tabourers, Harpours fele and crouders;

Now, I’ve known for a while that my last name — Crowder — came from the “crowd,” a Celtic fiddle of sorts (“crwth” was another way to write it). But here, finding it in the wild! Too good to be true. But it’s true. And it really is my name. After that I couldn’t help but see if it was in the OED. It was! “One who plays a crowd; a fiddler.” Words can’t express how excited I was to find that my surname is in the OED. Not only that, but it’s the first definition listed for “crowd”:

[a. Welsh crwth m. violin, fiddle; also, a swelling or bulging body, a paunch, a kind of round bulging box, akin to croth fem. swelling, protuberance, belly, womb. These words correspond as the masc. and fem. of adjs.: cf. crwm, crom crooked, etc. The fem. form alone is found in the other Celtic langs., but in both senses: cf. Gaelic cruit fem. harp, violin, croit fem. hump, hunch, Ir. cruit fem. violin, and hump, hunch; OIr. crot (genit. croite, cruite, dat. acc. croit) harp, cithara, in late L. crotta a British musical instrument mentioned by Venantius Fortunatus c 600.] prop. An ancient Celtic musical instrument of the viol class, now obsolete, having in early times three strings, but in its later form six, four of which were played with a bow and two by twitching with the fingers; an early form of the fiddle.

(I’m in a rush so we’ll have to skip on the italics this time.)

This made my day. :P

[tags]Sir Orfeo, OED, Crowder[/tags]

This morning after I left the temple, an idea came into my head. It looked roughly like this:

And now, eleven hours later (with an hour taken out for lunch), I’ve got most of it done. This screenshot is real — it’s not a mockup. There are still a few things to add (like the rest of the title details), but you can search for localities and navigate around and such. It’s pretty nice. :) The one caveat is that it takes a while to load the page if there are a lot of microfilms in the list, because it has to ping the UVRFHC’s server for each one. I’m going to talk to the people who coded the Perl file and see if I can send them multiple IDs at once and get a list back. That’d make it faster. As for the rest of it, it’s decently fast, especially considering that it’s screen-scraping everything. Hurray for regular expressions and Ruby! :) (It’s coded in Ruby on Rails, by the way.)

I ordinarily would have posted this only on Outside the Box, or Beyond, but I’m dead tired and so I’m just going to post it here for now as a work-in-progress. Oh, the UVRFHC is the family history center here at BYU. And the whole reason I did this is that ordinarily you can’t tell what films are in the family history center unless you go to the FHC’s site and pull up a little pop-up and type the film number in. This automates it all for you.

[tags]Family History Library Catalog, BYU[/tags]

I wasn’t able to attend the Family History & Genealogy Conference this year (I did last year), but they’ve already posted Marlin K. Jensen’s keynote from yesterday (thanks to Jacqueline for the heads up). Pretty darn fast. :) I’ve only skimmed through it, but it’s primarily about the new system (Family Tree).

(Incidentally, did I mention that the Family History Department called me a few weeks ago wanting to hire me to work on Family Tree? I sadly had to decline, because my future lies in librarianship, and it would’ve been almost impossible to commute up to Salt Lake considering that I would have classes and I don’t have a car. At least I had a cool journal entry for it… :))

[tags]LDS, Mormon, FamilySearch, genealogy, family history[/tags]

[I wrote this over on the Beyond blog, but it's an exciting enough idea that I figured I'd crosspost it so y'all can get an idea of how cool Beyond is going to be.]

Back in the mid-1800s, my ancestor Robert Shanks bought and sold a fair amount of land. One name that came up more than once was that of a Mr. Atkinson (I can’t remember his first name), a man who seemed fairly well to do.

Now fast-forward to today. I’m trying to find more information about Robert, but nothing seems to be coming up. If I know that he was somehow connected with Mr. Atkinson (through business transactions, in this case), I could start researching Mr. Atkinson to see if anything shows up. For all I know he could have been Robert’s father-in-law, or perhaps Robert’s family had lived with the Atkinsons for a few years, or Robert and Mr. Atkinson started a business together, or any number of other possibilities.

Now imagine being able to find one of Mr. Atkinson’s descendants, someone who’s been researching that very line and has a wealth of information about Mr. Atkinson, including his journal — which just happens to mention Robert Shanks.

Or pretend your ancestor Humphrey Call had a brother, Josiah, who lived hundreds of miles away from Humphrey and died without ever marrying. You’ve come to a dead-end with their line, but you suspect Josiah may have inherited the family Bible (he was the eldest, after all) and a number of other heirlooms. He wasn’t on speaking terms with Humphrey at his death, though, which is why they’ve disappeared.

Another researcher is working on the line of Michael Indigo, who happened to live in Josiah’s neighborhood. And this researcher finds a bunch of information for the Call family in Michael’s belongings — the family Bible, the love letters of Humphrey and Josiah’s parents, and a number of deeds for the family land. Turns out Michael and Josiah were friends.

So then the researcher adds Josiah Call to Michael Indigo as a friend. You get a message saying someone’s added Josiah Call to the database. You check it out and voila, turns out it’s the same Josiah, and you see that this researcher has a gold mine of records for your ancestors.

That’s the power of including non-family relationships in an interconnected online genealogy network. And that’s just one of the many cool things that Beyond will make possible.

(And just for the record, all of that stuff about Mr. Atkinson was completely made up, other than his name and the fact that he had land transactions with Robert Shanks. And the Call family and Michael Indigo are fictional as far as I know.)

[tags]Beyond, genealogy[/tags]

I’m in the middle of giving birth.

Not to a human child, of course (and now you no doubt have images of some alien creature emerging out of me, which is an admittedly disturbing thought), but to an idea. A website, actually. It’s the new incarnation of Beyond, more along the lines of a social network, and it’s going to be big.

At the moment, however, I’m wondering what in the heck I’ve gotten myself into. It’s madness, sheer insanity, and yet I can’t stop. It’s something that has to be done, has to be built. If it succeeds, great. If it flops, well, that’s too bad, but at least I’ll have popped the sucker out and I’ll be able to move on to other projects. :)

Right now I’m going through labor pains, so to speak, and it won’t be long before the mental muscles contract and push and gosh I don’t know much about the birth process so I’ll stop now before I make a fool of myself. :) Anyway, I imagine that when you’re on the bed at the hospital pushing, trying to get the baby to come out, it’s hard to concentrate on much of anything else. That’s how I feel right now. So, if I seem distracted and not-entirely-with-it over the next two months, that’s why. When I get into a project like this and really capture the vision of it in my head, I become obsessive. No, “tightly focused” has better connotations. :) And that’s a good thing, because intense energy is what’s needed to make these things come to life. I can rest after it’s over.

Anyway, I want to take a nap, but it’s not even noon yet. ~sigh~

[tags]Beyond, creativity[/tags]

Matt Crenson’s written an article for the Associated Press about the interrelatedness of the human family tree:

Whoever it was probably lived a few thousand years ago, somewhere in East Asia — Taiwan, Malaysia and Siberia all are likely locations. He — or she — did nothing more remarkable than be born, live, have children and die. Yet this was the ancestor of every person now living on Earth — the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the planet today.

It’s a good read, and quite interesting. (I think I posted about this — Charlemagne and all — a few months ago, incidentally. But this article has better coverage.)

As the number of potential ancestors dwindles and the number of branches explodes there comes a time when every single person on Earth is an ancestor to all of us, except the ones who never had children or whose lines eventually died out. And it wasn’t all that long ago. When you walk through an exhibit of Ancient Egyptian art from the time of the pyramids, everything there was very likely created by one of your ancestors — every statue, every hieroglyph, every gold necklace. If there is a mummy lying in the center of the room, that person was almost certainly your ancestor, too.

That explains my interest in ancient cultures and history. ;)

[tags]genealogy, family history, Associated Press[/tags]