Genealogy and Games
One key to happiness – GAMES
My wife Sue and I enjoy the hobby of family history, which includes dabbling in the field of genealogy. Because of our interest in this, we subscribe to Ancestry.com, an online organization that is a tremendous source of information about genealogy. As part of the subscription, we receive an electronic newsletter daily. Today’s newsletter included an article about quotes made by famous people regarding genealogy and family history. I enjoyed reading it, and a couple of them really got my attention, because they were listed as “taglines” for genealogist writers.
I recall not long ago that Coldfoot was trying to create a tagline for his writings about games. I believe he settled on: Boardgamers do it for hours. That is a clever tagline. So, when I saw the genealogist taglines, I remembered Coldfoot’s effort, and then I read one that totally took me by surprise.
Among the very clever genealogist taglines was this one: Genealogy is the marriage of a jigsaw puzzle to a Dungeons & Dragons game. Wow, I had never expected to see a cross-over reference between genealogy and gaming. Two of my hobbies joined in that line. Obviously, someone who worked jigsaw puzzles and had played or at least was familiar with D&D is working seriously in the genealogy field. Well, probably there are a lot of such folks, but I had never seen anything that confirmed that fact, until now. Gee, maybe my interest in a wide variety of hobbies is not so weird after all.
--- Gerald … near Denver, Colorado; February 2006
aka gamesgrandpa -- A grandpa who is a mile high on gaming
posted by Gerald McD @ 2/16/2006 02:26:00 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Ahh, even when you're not thinking about games, someone has to bring up the subject! :)
So how is genealogy like a D & D game? I know next to nothing about D & D so I don't get the simile.
I think the D&D reference indicates the amount of searching, sometimes up blind alleys, sometimes to a treasure (a document that proves a connection), sometimes to just a clue, which may or may not be a red herring. You have to fight some battles, sometimes to get access to something or convince someone to tell you something or to decipher some handwriting or some obscure reference. You have to figure out which information is your friend (accurate information that relates to your search) and which is your enemy (unsubstantiated or misleading info). That's the D&D part.
The jigsaw part is fitting all the correct clues together so that they make an accurate picture. I think it is a good description.
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