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| summer_in_seattle_baseball_safeco_baseball_stadium_seattle Courtesy of pxhere.com CCO:Public domain |
YES, Genealogy and BASEBALL! 🪾⚾
What? how can genealogy and baseball be alike? SO many ways.
First, baseball, like genealogy, is a team sport. While there are ways in baseball to practice specific skills like running, batting, throwing and catching by using machines. But playing baseball requires at least three people: a pitcher, a batter, and an outfielder. Many of us as kids played this way; we called it "work up" where there were no teams, just a bunch of kids playing baseball or softball (larger, softer ball).
Genealogy is a team sport. How much fun would it be to record only our own life? Some writers, videographers, podcasters, etc. do this, but I think you would agree that that is not genealogy. Genealogy is the study of our family and their ancestors, and we need a team to do that. We need, first, records of the lives who came before us. Think of all those people who faithfully noted, preserved, indexed and now make these records available to us—midwives and doctors, city and county courts, priests, rabbis, ministers, tax officials, surveyors, real estate agents and lawyers through the ages and government bureaucrats the world over.
Finally, we rely on finding those elusive ancestors in those records, and also in the private collections of our family, including the stories passed down through the generations. Once we have mined our own close family, to do thorough work, we need to branch out, and find the cousins, even those very distant from us. Maybe one of them has an old photo we don't have, or even better, the same photo—with identification of all the folks in the photo.
Baseball teams often must look outside of their own organization, their "family," for new talent. Perhaps a team member has been injured, or simply was not working well. My own home team, the Seattle Mariners, brought in a few new players as they made a run for the World Series, and some of them have played important roles in taking us closer than we have ever gotten to winning our division, the American League. One young fellow was brought up from years in the minor leagues, and made his first major league hit—on his 28th birthday, no less—to turn one game around. Another, Canadian Josh Naylor, "Naylz" has been an essential part of both our offense and defense these past few weeks.
Genealogists who work with everyone who can help, get much further than those who labor alone. Learn from everyone, use all the resources possible to build rich biographies for those who have lived the lives that made ours possible.
Finally, baseball players and teams must strive to learn new skills, new ways to analyze what they need to build the best teams possible, and the best leadership teams and game plans. Famously, the outstanding M's catcher Cal Raleigh challenged the Mariners ownership to step up their game before agreeing to renew his contract a few years back. His leadership has almost certainly been a large part of the success of the team recently.
WE must strive to learn new skills, new ways to analyze our history. We must focus on skill-building and then put it into practice. We should create detailed research questions, plans, locality guides, record-keeping, and writing. We want our descendants have our work as a solid foundation for future research. None of us can do it all; just as history was created by multitudes, we need multitudes to capture it.
Besides local genealogy, family history groups, museums, archives and libraries, these days we have access to a multitude of education. Much of it is free! Whether reading, listening or watching, there is much to chose from, including some quite intensive coaching, training, and even professional education. Whatever we choose, let's make it count, then put our new learning to work, and also, re-evaluate old work. We may find errors, but maybe also, the facts we seek in records we already have! It is sometimes said that the best archive we have is our own files. I would add: resources of our own team, whether family, genealogy buddy, coach, or educator.
YOU can become the leading expert on your own family, the MVP! (most valuable player, like Cal Raleigh). As Ichiro, one of the M's stars put it, let us Seize the Moment!
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| Valorie Zimmerman |
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