How's the Water?

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 I saw this cartoon in the past somewhere and could not forget it. No images I found online matched the image I remembered, so my talented husband Bob Zimmerman drew one for me: 

Copyright Robert Zimmerman 2021. Courtesy of Bob Zimmerman


The reason I love this cartoon is that we all know a simple question can open us to a new way of seeing the world, if we let it. 

I felt this way at a recent presentation of the Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO) called Looking Back / Moving Forward: Getting Started with Institutional Genealogy presented by Aletheia Wittman. In that presentation, she showed us a timeline which blew my mind and got me thinking about our society in a whole new historical perspective. We formed first as a branch of Seattle Genealogical Society (SGS) in 1979, and formally as an independent non-profit in 1984.[1]

Here is a portion of Aletheia Wittman's timeline; used by permission:

2. Courtesy Aletheia Wittman. Numbers in the black balls are number of AKCHO orgs reporting years of founding.


Certainly much could be added to the timeline, however, these were social factors I had never thought about in relationship to my own research before, or in relationship to the founding of our own society. 

As we consider the lack of diversity in our membership, in our communities and in our own family backgrounds, we might think about how to expand our thinking and consider more social factors affecting each of us. 

We can ask such questions of ourselves such as how have population and power dynamics shaped us over time? How can we make that awareness more conscious, and inform our deliberations, decision-making and budgets?

How's the water? 

1. http://skcgs.org/history.html
2. Portion of presentation slide by Aletheia Wittman to the Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO): Looking Back / Moving Forward: Getting Started with Institutional Genealogy, 20 July 2021.


Valorie Zimmerman, SKCGS President



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