As this week starts, I’m getting ready to go up to the North Country of New York for a couple of days. I love living in the city. I appreciate access to stores and having streetlights and sidewalks. I also appreciate the beauty of my state. Being in nature clears my mind.

Oddly enough, it’s thinking about the impact of nature that brings me around to this week’s topic, “Random”. As genealogists, we search for specific evidence validating our research questions. Specific typically relates to specific, such as census reports.

Randomness is less predictable, with no pattern to it. Sometimes, I relate random to unknown bits of information we uncover about our ancestors.

Newspapers are a great resource for this type of information. While researching my Barber family, I found my grandfather’s uncle lost an arm in a threshing machine accident. The article described him as “the one-armed cornet player from Elba, N.Y.”.  My grandfather had never mentioned it when talking about his family.

These random facts help to round out family history stories. They add color and humanity to the facts we uncover. I’m looking forward to the next random things I find out and the stories to be written.