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Lists and Things
by Val Atkinson
Article ID: 24, First Published: April 2005I am a person who likes making lists and getting to the bottom of them.
I clear my washing basket regularly and though I do let the ironing pile up it’s only because I actually like ironing (YES I REALLY DO!), and I enjoy a good session of it while watching a DVD.
When I finish one list I just make another and work through that.
It’s a very tidy way to go on, and I learned the system from my mother who still uses it at age 83. It means I can get through a massive amount of work so long as I can reach the bottom of a task list regularly. Even when a list is repeating itself, I don’t mind. It’s the ‘Getting to the bottom’ and ticking as I go that’s the name of the game.
People who want to get the best out of me always keep these little traits of mine in mind.
In my professional work I feel I really get to know the people who make research requests.
I read down the list of family details, and at the end is the question of the specific information the person is seeking.
Requests include birth/marriage/death certificates, or census and church records, but it isn’t the requests themselves, but the actual wording that reaches somewhere inside me. Here is a list of typical examples:
• Help me find out about my British side
• Would dearly love a marriage certificate
• I am seeking my Grandmother’s birth
• Looking for family history
• Confirm family knowledge
• I need the name of my Grandfather
• Anything to point me to my English family
• I’d like to know whatever there is to know
• Any information you can find
• Anything
From these requests of yours I have built up a picture of you as part of the great all encompassing international group who yearn towards their heritage from the past.
You are:
• Patient and take time
• A person who understands urgency but is never rash or in a hurry
• Developing problem solving skills (You think often of Sherlock!)
• Filled with devotion beyond the call of duty
• Walking the ‘extra mile’
• Desiring to discover your past
• Aware that ‘No man/woman is an island’
• Yearning to be part of something glorious and beautiful
• Focused on more than names and paper
• Finding your people
• Gathering your people into families
• Grafting new names into your family tree
• Claiming those that were strangers as your own
• Knowing that heaven cannot be heaven without family and friends
• Discovering family treasure
• Making ties with the past and binding yourself to them
• Growing oaks from acorns
• Focused on your mission in life
• Part of a proclamation that the family is bound with unbreakable ties
• Sure that time cannot destroy nor death disrupt family links
• Not being chivvied to ‘go out and find’
• Involved in the harvesting of family history
• Part of a house of order
• Full of enthusiasm and the ‘desire to find’
• Certain that the bluntest pencil is better than the sharpest mind
• Learning and applying new skills and techniques
• Imitating the experts until you’re one yourself
• Engaged in the job of a lifetime
I SALUTE YOU!
