Genealogy is Like Crochet

February 12, 2013 — ancestry, family tree, Sarah Archer

tatted doilie

My grandmother did  tatting, a lace work done with a tiny plastic shuttle which produced doilies. I have a large variegated doilie that she made but it is in the closet.  In my house it would be a big dust collector.  When I was young I did crochet, embroidery and some knitting. I taught myself to sew at boarding school when I was 14.   When I was 17 I learned to weave on a loom.  I like the art and enjoyment of crafting things for my own fashion purposes.  My mother was an advanced self styler creating matching hats, shoes and belts to go with her dresses. All of these activities are so satisfying until…..you make a mistake.  Then you find there is only one way out of your predicament..rip it out and start again.  The entire time you are ripping it out you must take care not to damage the materials, which requires that you not enter rip out rage too deeply.  This was agony to me, so I became a potter.  If you blow your creation before firing you simply quickly turn it back into mud.  If my pots were ugly and I did not want them to live I put them in a bush in the desert and shot them with a 22 pistol.  There was no ripping and remorse.  A different kind of patience is required to make pots.  You just accept that a certain percentage will fail and that is fine.

Last week I opened a message on Ancestry.com from a common descendant of Swain Smith.  I am always happy to hear from my fam on Ancestry because they bring extra data and sometimes have documents and pictures to share.  This cousin pointed out to me that I had an obvious error in my tree.  Swain’s father married twice, and I had listed his mother as the second wife.  Since he had been born before the second marriage my mistake was easy to spot.  I have revised my tree, and now have no clue about the pedigree of Swain’s real mother.  I can only rip out the branches of the tree that I built on a specious assumption and start again.  I am so totally back in crochet world.   I have to go back to the place where I skipped the loop of my 4th great-grandmother, Sarah Archer, born in New Jersey in 1787.  She is my new mystery woman.