Skip to main content

Featured

Jane's Illness: Home Care, Her Doctor & Her Caretakers

Vasily Polenov, The Patient, public domain   Over the past few weeks, we've discovered that Jane Darragh, my great-great grandmother who died of acute mania, may have had multiple episodes of the disease. Her children's births were separated by several years in some cases—unusual for the time—suggesting that she experienced infertility, miscarriages, or stillbirths during her childbearing years. And we learned that Jane likely supported her husband Charles' blacksmith career by caring for their home and four children. This week, we'll look at whether Jane was institutionalized for her mania, what her treatment might have been, and who her physician was.   It does not appear that Jane was ever institutionalized for her illness, at least for the episode prior to her death .  Medical practice of the day suggested there were two options for treating acute mania; the first was to treat the person in the home if they were amenable, for example, willing to eat food offered or...

Behind the Stories: A Peek Behind the Research Curtain

Do you want to peek behind the genealogical curtain? 1

Have you ever wondered how I come up with information for my blog posts? It should come as no surprise that the stories all flow from research discoveries.

Genealogical research can be as simple as ordering a vital record, like a birth or death record. Or, it can be as complicated as researching multiple generations of a family line for a lineage society, or looking deeply at a person or event—and take several months to complete.

The constant in all my research? I invariably find many interesting stories along the way to answering a specific research question, and these stories beg to be told.

I recently focused on my Croatian great grandmother for a two-part blog series. The information I uncovered was the product of the "Research Like a Pro," research process I use, created by genealogists/podcasters Diana Shults Elder and Nicole Dyer. They kindly asked me to write about my project for their FamilyLocket blog.

So, if you'd like to peek behind my "genealogical curtain," dive into the blog post, "Identifying Reasons for Emigration Using the Research Like a Pro Process."2

Until next time...

Subscribe to "Leaves on the Tree," to receive more family history stories, right in your email box. Click the green Subscribe link above.



NOTES

1 Sir John Tenniel, Alice in Wonderland illustration, Project Gutenberg (https://bit.ly/2JNrG8s: accessed 6 April 2020). This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net.

2 Diana Elder and Nancy Gilbride Casey, "Identifying Reasons for Emigration Using the Research Like a Pro Process." FamilyLocket, 11 March 2020 (https://bit.ly/2JIvbx7 : accessed 6 April 2020).









Comments