It's Been One of Those Days

 

Here I was, intending to harvest links today for researching Theresa Blaising Stevens' parents records back in France. That was the plan, at least. But things turned out differently. Let's just say it's been one of those days...

My go-to place for learning more about how to research a new area in my family history is the FamilySearch wiki. However, I don't just go straight to the wiki; I first google the terms I'm seeking and designate the specific website where I want to search. To test the information I found the other day on Laurent Blaising, Theresa's supposed father, I looked for the wiki which would include a guide to researching Romelfing in Moselle.

While wandering through the choices served up in my Google search for wiki resources, I found a French Genealogical Word List—helpful indeed for someone whose memory of college French is quite faded.

Somewhere in all my searching—and selecting to open each discovery in a new tab—I ran across the same wiki page in English and French. Hmmm, I thought to myself, maybe I should cross-check these two and see if there is more information in the French version.

It was a great idea—and rather daring of me, considering my rusty French—but somehow there must have concurrently been a glitch in the ether as I made my fateful selection. Suddenly, every time I tried to look for something on the FamilySearch website, it offered up the page to me in French.

Quoi?

Did you know there is a way to switch languages while using FamilySearch? Of course, in retrospect, I can see how that would be useful for an organization which freely offers views of digitized records to people from around the world. But at the moment, I was panicking at the thought of being doomed to never view that website in English again. 

I realized there had been some other online glitches throughout the day—Ancestry.com, for instance, seemed to have its "hints" system unavailable for a few hours yesterday—but how was I suddenly assigned a language I couldn't speak?

Cool heads prevail when using computers, so I tried to contain my dismay and look for a reasonable answer. Well, forget the answer; I have no idea what happened. But for someone who learns how to use a program by clicking until I find the answer—I'm a hunt-and-peck student—I soon discovered the use of the "world" icon at the top of the page.

Despite that unexpected detour, I did find a wiki page on Moselle, the department in which Romelfing is located. And by using the catalog, I now have another item added to my to-do list for the next trip to Salt Lake City: the yet-to-be digitized microfilms of the civil registrations during the time period in which Laurent Blaising and his wife would have lived there.

No matter how crazy a day might turn out to be, at least if we take it step by step, we eventually can get something accomplished.