What’s in a married name?

I’ve been thinking about the reasons we research our family trees, specifically women who research their husband’s family. You know the ones – the husband isn’t interested and the wife is stuck with hers so she moves on to build a tree for her husband, and gets hooked.

I’ve never really understood this clearly, until today.

We’re all familiar with the phenomenon of the genealogist who is only interested in their own surname. These are mostly males, in my experience, who follow their direct male as far back as they can go and then stop. I can sort of understand this – there is an attraction to seeing your own surname in the records that is reduced when you see maiden surnames. It’s a bigger thrill for me to find a Riley than a Stewart or a Goode.

My breakthrough came when I considered that I didn’t change my name when I got married. I’ve been married for 22 years and some months, and I made the decision to keep my name. It’s my name, after all.

But what if I had changed it? What if I’d spent the last 22 years as Carole Bassett (it seems weird just seeing it written there) instead of Carole Riley? I’d been writing it and signing it and answering to it and filling in forms with it and opening mail with it on the front? I’d feel like a Bassett now, wouldn’t I?

So of course I’d be interested in the Bassetts, and where they came from. Especially if I had kids and their name was Bassett. Or some awful hyphenated Riley-Bassett or Bassett-Riley. So if my Bassett wasn’t doing his own (a rarity among husbands!) I’d be doing it and saying it’s for him. When really it would be for me.

You just have to put yourself in the shoes of the people you are trying to understand, and it all becomes much clearer.

Procrastination station

It’s a windy Sunday afternoon, too windy to be outside, so I have no excuse to not be finishing my ProGen assignment. So what am I doing? I’m playing with the Society of Australian Genealogists website. My assignment is a proof argument – an article, or essay if you like, arguing a case for the solution of a genealogical question that is not straightforward. I have chosen the question of the first Riley in Fiji, and as I started writing it I saw how much work I still have to do before I can say I’ve performed a reasonably exhaustive search of all the relevant records.

The relevant records, unfortunately, are ships’ logs and books published by castaways that all have to be found and deciphered and searched for clues. I’ve got two, so far, that talk about my Riley and I may never find any more, so I’m writing about them. The extended deadline is the 30th September, which is getting closer! So much for the reason for the procrastination.

What I’m doing instead (besides writing this) is looking at the website for the SAG. It was developed using Joomla, the old version, by people who are no longer with the Society and so I have to learn enough of Joomla to be able to make fundamental changes to the website without breaking it.

To do that safely I need a copy I can work on, and I’ve always put off doing that until today, when I have something more urgent to do! I guess that’s how procrastination works, and at least I will have done something constructive.

I’ll add progress reports through the afternoon.

[4 or 5 hours later] I’ve given up on copying the website. Joomla 1.0 is no longer supported and I can’t find any way to just copy the whole thing. I can copy the content but it left out the front page (oops!) and all the menus, and the forms were created using a component that hasn’t been supported since 2006. So then I tried copying everything, including the Joomla installation, and I can’t get the 74MB up on the other server.

I’m over it.

I watered the garden in frustration. I’ll stick with Twitter, I reckon!