Standing note to myself
I have been struggling with notetaking. While I’m immersed in the work and up to my elbows in papers I feel like I know this family so well that there’s no way I’ll forget the different storylines I’m uncovering. But after a week of real life it is so hard to remember what I was doing a week prior. I’ve tried taking pictures and writing notes… but the process of making sense of this stuff is so overwhelming that it’s impossible to remember what’s important to know. So end of day notes are an ongoing problem, but unless I want to spend the last hour of my time each day writing myself a summary of everything I did, everything I learned, and everything I wanted to look up but got distracted… well that would take the whole day.
Along these same lines I’ve been struggling with my notetaking skills in general. At this point I have about 10 pages of notebook filled up with “notes” that are just random names, dates, or indecipherable symbols. I learned how to do research two ways – with notecards where you copy every fact and quote or using Zotero to save every citation for each source you consult. I don’t have all the time in the world (notecards) or internet access (Zotero) and even if I did, these are primary sources. My instinct is to document every little thing and cite where it came from, but common sense and MPLP are screaming in my brain that I can’t process at the item level. I have made some adaptations. I have made a concerted effort to take notes in full sentences. Instead of writing “Burnap Post 3 Aug 1911” and then having zero recollection of what that means and where I got it, I’m trying to write complete thoughts. e.g.” Burnap Post was Mary Elizabeth’s second cousin. “I also put a reminder on my project binder to do things neatly and legibly the first time around. Barbara has such neat handwriting and it seems so effortless that more than once this month I’ve loaded my Amazon cart with various penmanship workbooks. Why don’t they teach us library hand in school anymore? Meanwhile I keep writing things down thinking “I’ll copy this neatly later,” but by the time I go to transcribe I have no idea what it’s all about.
Similarly my finding aid has been written and rewritten a million times. I keep telling myself it’s just a draft and I’ll write the real thing later. It dawned on me that this is just adding an extra layer of work to the project. Why do I do this?
These families are more confusing than a modern family. They ALL have the same names, and it’s not just the common names. Forget knowing the difference between Daniel K. Daniel M. and the mysterious other Daniel Burnap who drowned in a river at age 13, I can’t event be sure that Bissell E. and Bissell K. are different people. To make things worse, I’ve been consulting different histories and retrospectives of prominent citizens of the area like The History and Genealogies of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut and the Commemorative biographical record of Tolland and Windham counties, Connecticut. But these books are from 1893 and 1903 respectively, and have a great deal of contradictory information.
I’m afraid I will never make sense of this collection unless I want to take the time to become an EXPERT in these families – chasing down vital records, etc. – which I know is exactly what you’re NOT supposed to do as an archivist processing collections. Based on the literature we read in class I thought it would be easy enough flip through the papers and get a general idea of what was there and regarding whom. My only other hands-on experience was sorting cemetery records at Green-Wood and that was dealing with one person at one specific time in their lives. This is at least 50 people over 200 years. It’s soul-crushing, in a way. I’ve been asked to do something I should know how to do if I want to pursue my chosen profession, and yet I feel constantly underwater. WHAT IS ALL THIS STUFF!!!
WHAT DO THESE NOTE MEAN?
No clue.
For real, no clue.