Summering

 

Our local genealogical society recently wrapped up what I suppose we could call our spring semester. Each year, we host monthly membership meetings through June, then take a break over the summer, before resuming our schedule in September. 

This, apparently, is not how every local family history organization operates. When I first started looking at what other groups were doing, I noticed several that continued meeting straight through the summer. Sure, there were events like a July "ice cream social" to round out the year's activities, but those groups kept at it, month after month. For some, the idea of summering is apparently quaint and so nineteenth century.

On the other hand, genealogy to me was always a summertime-only event. If I was lucky, I might be able to squeeze in a few frantic research trips during the winter break, but otherwise, the teaching workload demanded full attention the rest of the year. I've had readers of A Family Tapestry contact me and mention that was the case for them, as well. It made sense to learn that our local society called it quits, come mid-June.

Around here, apparently, the idea of summering is still in force. Perhaps that's because we are a university town, populated by enough residents who expect to escape for the entire summer. Come to think of it, at our June meeting, two board members were already absent—one heading to Mexico, the other one traveling in Europe. And that is only the start of the season.

A second group of summer absentees is comprised of those for whom family vacations came with built-in side trips to visit family cemeteries along the route, or to pick up documents at nearby governmental offices while on the way to visit relatives. I wasn't sure whether that was still part of today's summertime existence, but the other day, a former genealogy class member emailed me to joyfully note she was actually on her way to pick up a grandparent's paperwork from a county nearly a hundred miles from here. There is no time like the present, true, but I imagine a trip like that would be more enjoyable in summer weather than wintertime storms.

Still, I'm hardly convinced that today's researchers reserve summer months for their genealogical pursuits any more. Or is it a sense of "keeping up with the Joneses" that pushes me to think that in our times a genealogical society should keep operations going full steam ahead, even through those summer months?