Correct vs Incorrect

I often pull topics for my blog from genealogy pages and groups. Whatever question is most often found for the week is the question I will try to answer. About a month ago, the question became "How do I do this right?" People were asking how to rate a source to determine it's accuracy, how to cite their sources, how to create research notes, how to make family charts.......... but it was all about doing it "right". Often, I answered the query as honestly as I could based on genealogical standards and personal preferences. Then someone else would come along and accuse me of being the Genealogy Police and saying I had no right to tell people how to handle their family history. Every. Single. Time.

Did they not notice the original question was asking how to do this right?

In the end, I came to the conclusion that I would devote more time to breaking down records and showing people what facts were available and how to source those records for themselves and others. Between the online conversations and a few tutoring opportunities (including teaching an aunt how to research for adoptees), I realised the new direction I wanted to take with my blog was going to be important for many who were just starting out or wanting to take genealogy more seriously. And that others would think that I was talking down to or otherwise insulting people "doing their own thing." So before I start my new format, I want to take a post to explain why there is a correct way of doing things and an incorrect way.

Now, in reality, there is only one truly incorrect way in genealogy: Clickophilia. If you start building your tree by turning off your brain, you're doing it wrong. Genealogy is "the study of generations" and does require your mental engagement in order to be successful. Whether that means you're going to draw your tree on the wall with crayons or write it out in a ten volume book set including glossy photos and detailed bibliography doesn't matter as long as you are willing to put on your thinking helmet. If your entire tree is made out of blindly clicking on leaf hints on Ancestry.com, uploading and merging other family member's Gedcom files, and entering in compiled genealogy books you find in the library (or more likely, Google Books), you are doing this wrong. So very wrong. But what is the "right" way? There is no *one* right way. There are no genealogy laws, so there are no Genealogy Police............. but there are genealogy software programs.

Now, I've said before, if you're going to have a paper research format, or keep your online work private, go ahead and add undocumented lines or links to Adam and Eve (or Odin or Hercules). You don't need to take research notes or write down your sources if you don't want to. I mean, you'll end up with loads of mistakes and no way to know if you looked at this record or that one, but that's your deal. When you collaborate with others, however, there is the unspoken agreement that you are both trying to be as accurate as possible. The other person won't grill you on your sources, but it's good to be prepared to give them as proof of your conclusions. Despite the connotations some would give it, a genealogist gets used to crafting a "Proof Argument". Basically, it's "I've found these records that prove my theory that X person lived in Y place and married Z person with these kids. I've also considered these records, but they can't be X person due to such and such reasonable doubt." The sources don't have to presented in MLA format and the argument doesn't have to be written out like a thesis. But when I talk about my grandfather being born in Morganfield Kentucky, I can "prove" that with his birth record, 1930 and 1940 U.S. censuses, World War II enlistment form, and SS5. I can argue that a similarly named fellow living at the same time in Arkansas is *not* my grandfather, because that man's death record doesn't have the same parents listed as the records I've found for my grandfather. That man's census records don't intersect with the rest of grandpa's family, and is miles away from any place he ever lived. But if I didn't have those sources, if I didn't craft a compelling argument, another cousin who only knew grandpa lived in Arkansas when he died may mistakenly believe this other man is our grandfather and start clicking away. They'd have to seriously shut off their brain, but it happens.

And that's the point: people have to shut off their brains to make a mistake and perpetuate it to others. Computers don't have brains. Remember the old adage "Garbage in, garbage out". If you're getting wild hints for an ancestor, it could be the algorithm pulling up records based on part but not all of your information in an attempt to find you records............. but it's more likely that a relative has connected that record to your ancestor in *their* tree and the computer system is giving weight to the record based on their attachment. Computer systems are built on the information that humans give them. Which is important to remember when crafting a search, too. How someone decided to index a record can affect how it shows in a search. If women are indexed with their maiden name, and you don't know it, having listed them in your tree with their married name won't help you. If an ancestor was born in, say, Orange County NC, but the part of the county he lived in became Caswell County by the time he died, you may be able to search for his death in Caswell and find it easily, but there won't be a birth record for him there! On the other hand, if you're using the system's mapping tools, those are based on today's landscape........ so listing his birthplace as Orange County will make it look like he moved when he didn't. Or if his town/county no longer exists, the map won't know where to pin him down. If you don't know a first name or a surname and you add characters like ? or * to indicate that, you could be using the search tool's wildcard characters by mistake and now come up with completely different results versus leaving the field blank. And while I'd like to agree with people who say that a couple that never married should never be listed as each other's "spouse", I've had unmarried couples identify each other as "spouse" in a record (for whatever purpose) and be indexed as such. Not having their profiles attached simply because I don't want to identify them as "spouse" means their names won't be included in a general search for each other and I may miss the very record I'm looking for. The computer system may ignore the record and not return it at all, or it may have it 10 pages in because it isn't weighted higher in the algorithm.

Search algorithms........ a computer programmer sat down and decided what fields would be included, and how close to the data input a record needs to be in order to be included. Without getting too technical, each field gets a score range and results are "weighted" based on score ranges. If I look for John Smith, I could get returns for John Cooper and Rob Smith just as much as I get John Smith. If I look for John Smith in Virginia, my first results should/could be for John Smith in Virginia, but could also be John Cooper in Virginia and John Smith in Maryland. If I look for John Smith born in 1940 Virginia, I get that and John Cooper born 1940 in Virginia, John Smith born 1900 in Virginia, John Smith born 1940 in Carolina............... with the most matched fields coming up to the top. And what I attach to my John Smith affects other John Smith searches (think of how Google will bring popular websites to the first page of search results). If a person is attached to me via Ancestry's Member Connect, that is taken into account by the system and the computer shows first what I've attached to our common ancestor. If 100 people attach the same photo to the same/similar John Smith, then that is ranked higher in the algorithm than the 1 person who attached the right photo to *my* John Smith (which I find on page 3 if I am willing to click through).

To better illustrate this: John Kemper of Fauquier County Virginia, born 1692 in Germany, died abt. 1758 in Virginia, married abt. 1716 to Ailsey Utterbach. Several hundred trees on Ancestry can be found. Hundreds of descendants connect to him. He's my favorite. His wife is alternatively listed as Alice or Alce, Otterback or Otterbach or Utterback. We all agree this is the same person and we attach the same familiar 9 records. One day...... or rather, one week, I decided to do a full search of Ancestry. The results were 70,000+ even with all the information I have available on him. Were there really only 9 real hits for this man in all of those 70,000? I made it about halfway through the results, I admit it. But I found 70 more entries for John Kemper than anyone else had attached to their tree. Many of them were genealogies of other surnames that connected to him via a child, but still. So now, when my aunt searches John Kemper with the same information, instead of the hundreds of descendants who couldn't think of a better name coming up first, she gets more of these lesser known hits. And the next cousin sees them higher up on the list because my aunt and I have attached them. And the cousin who's connected via Member Connect doesn't have to do a search because the system sends them an alert that we've attached the record first.............. and so on. But of those hundreds of trees, at least half of them have added census and land records for John Kemper II to his father John (I told you they had no imagination). So while the correct records are out there, census records are weighted very high and many will blindly connect to them. Now, those of you who have your thinking caps on are already aware that John Kemper d. 1758 couldn't possibly be listed in the first U.S. census of 1790. And while it may make sense to believe John had land, digging into the records would indicate he wasn't legally eligible to own land and records stating he lived on land owned by his son back this up. But the land records are only indexed online, so people see the name and the location and click click click............


So for the sake of the computer systems that know no better, there are some things we must consider a "rule":
- Date format: whether you put the month first or the day first, the month must be SPELLED OUT to avoid confusion. I've gotten so used to putting day first that in my everyday American life, I often confuse the dates my friends and coworkers write down (until the 13th day of a month, I lose my mind). If you don't know the exact date (or can't find documentation of a date for a fact) add Abt. for "about or around", Bef. for "before", and Aft. for "after". A baptismal record isn't proof of birth, so a birth year would be "qualified" by adding Abt. to the year or Bef. added to the date of the baptism. Same philosophy for burial records and censuses. If it doesn't directly describe an event, it isn't concrete proof of a date and qualification must be made.
- Locations: the old genealogy standard is to use the location name as it was at the time the record was made. Go ahead and keep that standard if you wish, but any location service provided by a computer will not put the results where they actually need to go. I use the current location in the field, and the original location in the description. I also put in my research notes a timeline of when the change happened. If you have FTM, you can add events to a general timeline that you can view for your person. It already has world events and will add family events (like the birth of children), so adding one for the change of a county name could help remind you.
- Maiden names: A woman should always be listed in a tree by her maiden name. ALWAYS. If you don't know a maiden name, I recommend leaving it blank. Some say dashes or underscores work for them ( - or _ ) without ruining the search algorithm and keeps them in some kind of order in their name index, and that's fine. But don't use any character that is a wildcard in the search tool! And LNU and MNU shouldn't be used as there are actual surnames Lnu and Mnu. Unknown shouldn't be added as the search tool will try to find that as a surname and when it can't, it will give extra weight to names that start with U or possibly sound like Unknown.
- Unknown first or last name: Like I said, no wildcard characters. If you don't know parents, but want to add siblings you do know, add a father profile with the surname but no first name. That's enough. You don't need to add a mother too, so there's no reason I should be getting tree hints for John being married to Unknown Unknown or my personal favorite: Mother MNU.
- Cite your sources!: When you attach a record from the search tool to your tree, Ancestry does the citing for you. Same with any tree service that also provides a search tool: you find the record and attach it to the profile, the company makes the link for you. But if you find records on one site and transfer the information to your tree on another site (or on paper/computer program if you aren't an online tree person), then you have to make some kind of citation for that source. WHY? First for yourself: if you know where you've looked, you won't look there again. And for others: you can save someone else a step. You don't have to put up images of a document you paid money for, or just hand over your research to complete strangers, but giving at least a citation of "found this death record on Missouri's Digital Heritage collection" could be enough to keep someone going. How detailed you make that citation is up to you (and I'll give you a couple of alternative citations in my upcoming records series).

There are more ways to create and maintain a family tree than there are flavors of ice cream at Baskin Robbins. But no one walks around with a lump of ice cream in their naked hand.
-Ana

Speak to What You Know

Some time ago, a friend of mine directed me to a review online about Ancestry.com. She was amused at the misinformation and misunderstanding from the blogger himself as well as the claims made in the comments by others. Much of what was said were things I had seen a hundred times already and I took it upon myself to comment. I received notifications on occasion that a reply or new comment had been made and I'd go back to it if I felt it warranted another go. After a while, I pretty much gave up on the comments as they all seemed to just want to pat themselves on the back and agree that Ancestry.com was horrible. This weekend another comment was made and it was full of ridiculous statements that only proved that these people continue to not know what is going on or read what has already been said. That the reviewer didn't give the site a fair trial is ignored by these people who seem to believe that all the information they need should be and is somewhere free on the internet "if you look hard enough". So instead of continuing to argue with them on that page, and knowing that there are many who aren't on that review (now very old, like 2010) who spew the same silly things, I thought I'd address the objections here for a moment. I'm going to quote and breakdown the argument from the most recent comment.

"The whole setup is a huge earner for many companies as people business, is big business and they are simply cashing in on it.
Firstly, most of the information found in their public records can be found online if you are persistent and know where to look and even a lot of that data is either not precise or incorrect.
The parts that would be of interest to me is the public member trees, photos and scanned documents which of course is only put up by people, these are not official public records and I am not going to pay hundreds of dollars per year just for that, because it`s simply not good value for money.
So in fact ancestry.com and their subsidiary companies change a fee to subscribed members to place their data onto their site and others have to pay subscribe in order to access that information, then all the owners do is sit back and watch all the paid subscriptions coming in, or in other words, this racket is a nice little earner.

Also there are probably many of our details on the ancestry.com site or as parts of others family trees, without our knowledge and without our permission and if discovered ancestry.com gives the complainants a real hard time trying to have the stuff deleted. People can publish a lot of private material about others on ancestry.com without permissions or concerns about copyrights as in many cases they are protected under the auspices of these so-called genealogical companies, which means many people unbeknown to them are making contributions to these companies and the only ways to discover if we are listed on their sites is to pay subscribe ourselves. These huge companies are in a win, win situation.

I have no prejudices against any companies making achievements and becoming successful, but my grievances are; is that anyone can place data about anyone on there with virtually no questions asked and I ask; why should I or others have no say with our details being publish on those sites and why should people have to pay subscribe to access information about themselves?"

 

My responses will be highlighted:

"Firstly, most of the information found in their public records can be found online if you are persistent and know where to look and even a lot of that data is either not precise or incorrect." Since Ancestry.com compiles records from other repositories, yes you can find many collections elsewhere. Vital records, for instance, but not every state/country provides their own online database. As for the information not being precise or correct, welcome to genealogy, the microfiche is to your left and the pots of coffee for your midnight searches is on the right. Use pencil in your notes, because you'll be making a lot of adjustments to what you "know" as you learn. But please don't ignore the many collections digitised and compiled by Ancestry.com itself and available nowhere else.
"The parts that would be of interest to me is the public member trees, photos and scanned documents which of course is only put up by people, these are not official public records and I am not going to pay hundreds of dollars per year just for that, because it`s simply not good value for money." If anyone is paying hundreds of dollars to take the photos and scanned documents from public member trees, they are wasting their money. Mundia.com allows you to see the same public trees for free. You pay Ancestry.com for the records that are not found elsewhere online or not found elsewhere for free. And if all you do is pull your information from other people's research, no wonder you find so many errors.
"So in fact ancestry.com and their subsidiary companies change a fee to subscribed members to place their data onto their site and others have to pay subscribe in order to access that information, then all the owners do is sit back and watch all the paid subscriptions coming in, or in other words, this racket is a nice little earner." Again, you pay for records access, not to steal/borrow/take/collaborate/whatever off a public member's tree. And since you can upload and build a tree for free, subscribers aren't being charged to "place their data onto [Ancestry.com]". You want just public member tree information? Try Mundia.com, same trees, same fluff, no records.

"Also there are probably many of our details on the ancestry.com site or as parts of others family trees, without our knowledge and without our permission and if discovered ancestry.com gives the complainants a real hard time trying to have the stuff deleted. People can publish a lot of private material about others on ancestry.com without permissions or concerns about copyrights as in many cases they are protected under the auspices of these so-called genealogical companies, which means many people unbeknown to them are making contributions to these companies and the only ways to discover if we are listed on their sites is to pay subscribe ourselves. These huge companies are in a win, win situation." First, searching is free, it's accessing records that is a charge. You can search yourself out to see if you are listed. As said before, Mundia.com shows public trees, so you can search and view public trees from Ancestry.com for free to see if you've been placed in someone's tree. Second, facts are not copyrighted. The fact that you were born in Oklahoma is not copyrighted and anyone can place a profile of you with that fact on it. Now, a photo of your first birthday taken by your mother is copyrighted by your mother and must have permissions from your mother prior to upload *if it bothers your mother* but you have no copyright claim to that photo and cannot request it's removal based on a copyright claim. If you write a story about your life, that story is under copyright, but the facts *inside* that story are not and can be used. Living people are supposed to be private, so if you were to find yourself on a public tree and clearly visible, you can have the profile removed or privatised in the tree as a breach in TOS. This whole paragraph seems to be the commentor's effort to prove how greedy genealogy companies are without actually knowing how they make money or what copyright means.

"I have no prejudices against any companies making achievements and becoming successful, but my grievances are; is that anyone can place data about anyone on there with virtually no questions asked and I ask; why should I or others have no say with our details being publish on those sites and why should people have to pay subscribe to access information about themselves?" Just one more paragraph illustrating that this person, much like others who commented, have no idea what genealogy is or how these genealogy sites really work. That they chose Ancestry.com for this particular review doesn't matter. These complaints are out there for every site.

This is just one seemingly rational person making the worst mistakes of assumption about Ancestry.com. I see these same arguments a hundred times a day. Right up there with the charge per month being too much (which is still the cheapest out there and much cheaper than offline research), bashing Mormons (there is some serious misinformation about Mormons and genealogy/Ancestry.com that never goes away), and automatic subscription renewal being unethical (I would seriously love a list of the websites for any service that don't autorenew your subscription). And I'll close this brief rant with two problems I had with the initial review:

1. The reviewer never does the 14 day trial, because he won't put in a credit card number. That's all well and good, but it's not a fair trial of the site. He could've gone to the library to use their edition for free. He could've used a prepaid credit card if his worry was protecting his privacy and financial accounts. He could've done as normal people do and tried it out for a day or two and then cancelled the trial prior to charging (saving his cancellation number should a charge go through anyway). I would never accept the review for any product from someone who didn't actually use the product. He doesn't even seem to attempt to check the card catalogue for the hundreds of free databases that could've been of use to him without a subscription. He doesn't even acknowledge they exist.

2. The reviewer seems to think that one day we'll have this large crowd sourced site that will take over for the pay sites. An interesting idea........ that's already been tried. Rootsweb, Geni, Mundia, MyHeritage, and even the one Family Tree on FamilySearch.org all try to put researchers in the driver's seat. And we all know how those user submitted parts of sites do, don't we? (One World Tree ringing any bells?) There is nothing more frustrating or error-ridden than user submitted information without source citation. What I also find confusing is where he and his supporters think all the documents for this crowd source are going to come from. Obviously they believe most of the information available anywhere is completely free if you just search hard enough. But anyone who's done genealogy for even a few months knows how much is payment only, even offline. I may be able to get a free copy of a vital record in many states as long as it's 100 years old or more, but I'm going to have to pay for my grandparents', parents', and my own certificates. And don't get me started with sites like ScotlandsPeople, which I love but have to pay for each search page and each image I want to view on the search page. And while I enjoy sharing my paid research with family so they can save some money, I'm not about to break copyright laws just so complete strangers don't have to pay money. People who believe genealogy should be free seem to ignore how many of the sources we use weren't made for the benefit of genealogists (census, anyone?) and we are lucky they exist! Just because your family is listed doesn't mean you own the records. The cost of housing, digitising, transcribing, indexing, and protecting these sources have to be covered somewhere. And no, not every source of genealogical information is paid for with your tax money since not every source is governmental in origin (baptismal records?). But the reviewer keeps insisting that one day this will be possible. One day we will have a Wikipedia style genealogy site that is totally free and totally user submitted public information.

You have fun with that, Sunshine. I'll pay to actually get somewhere in my research.

-Ana

(I considered not linking to the review so as to not give this man more traffic, but I thought others should have as much fun as I have: http://shoutsfromtheabyss.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/ancestry-com-can-eat-my-ass/ )

More Than One Road to Roam

It happens in every skill: you reach the level of expertise that you forget the basics. Trying to explain to a beginner how to start isn't as easy as it used to be. You do the first steps by instinct more than conscious action. Math teachers were hounding us as children to "show the work", because they wanted to make sure we had the fundamentals clearly in hand. Sometimes you found a faster route; other times you just "knew" the answer. When you have to split a restaurant bill between your friends, do you pull out a pencil and do it longhand or do you figure it quickly in your head? This is why professionals and enthusiasts in every hobby will recommend a frequent and regular refresher on the very basic rules of any endeavor. Genealogy is no exception. Once you've gotten your tree on a healthy growth spurt, you just "know" what the next steps will be. You know what paths to take in your research even when the evidence isn't conclusive. Explaining either the conclusion or the road you travelled to anyone else is made difficult because you've forgotten how to "show the work". And when you forget the starting steps, you can sometimes get into a rut of which road you take.

One of the most popular ruts is the census. For most people, outside of interviewing family, this is the first document one will try to find. It's a good document! Every 10 years, family names and relationships, occupations, birth years and locations...... lots of information. A snapshot of  your family unit. But some people become so blinded by the need to find a census, that when one is not available (1890 US census, anyone?), they are at a loss for next steps. Their usual route is washed out and they're lost in the woods. So they relearn the need to look at siblings and neighbors for clues. They need reminding to review city directories, newspapers, military history, land deeds, or occupation. They know of the other records, to be sure. But they are used to a different starting point, so starting somewhere else is too foreign a concept. It takes a minute to readjust.

My own personal genealogy has seen a boom in activity thanks to new digitised records (one less trek in the snow!!!), DNA tests, and more receptive family. I've never pestered any family member to share information and always believed that was the best way to go about it. I want people to feel comfortable talking to me, not feel interrogated. But I'm always excited to find someone finally willing to open up. Until we start talking and they can't remember names or dates. Or they leave things out, because they don't think it's "important" and I spend two hours prying stories out of them to hopefully glean some sort of fact out of it all. My fiance, who has done research for his lines but never really gotten the "genealogy bug", is slowly sharing what he knows. Suddenly I've got a new to me country with new to me relatives. And I've got new to me hurdles.

You see, my fiance is British. His family is English and Welsh. I've got a lot to learn about what I can find long distance and what I need local access to work. I need to work around a 100 year privacy law and an ocean. And I need to start at the beginning. He was smart enough to ask relatives for their information and share what he had already researched. I am smart enough to take this unsourced information and verify. As I worked on the information, I often found myself texting or calling my fiance to ask for clarification. Having already done the work, he was giving me a lot of conclusions without the show.......... which meant we had some problems remembering how we got where we did.

Just part of the conversation:

N: So grandpa Ken, what have you found out?

A: Ken? Your mom's dad.

N: Yeah, Kenneth. Mum's dad. He was nice. (family story time)

A: Okay, when did he die? When was he born? When did he marry your grandmother? Was your mom their first kid?

N: (to all of them) Dunno. Can't remember.

A: Okay....... um, how old were you when he died?

N: 11 or 12 I think. Grandma moved. (New family story time)

A: Oh? Moved to where?

N: I dunno....... they used to live in .......

A: Okay, I have a Kenneth James who died '88 in that town. Maybe?

N: I dunno. You're the genealogist.

A: Good thing I love you.

Now I'll use this to illustrate my point (thank goodness, right?). I work backwards, so first I want to know when Ken died. My fiance couldn't remember exactly, but he was there. Okay, so I can either ask if he remembers how old grandpa was or if he remembers how old he was. Adding in the little tidbit about where he remembered visiting grandpa and where grandma moved to after his death helped me narrow down where he possibly died. Being a recent death, my access is limited to an index, so without a little bit of information, I would never be sure who was *my* Ken and who wasn't. For those of us who've gotten into that rut of research, we could give up. We could start aimlessly looking for his birth record instead. Or maybe I could hope to recognise his name in a census. But the last UK census released was the 1911 census......... would Ken even be old enough to be on it? He wasn't. Thankfully, Ken died where he lived so I was able to get his birthdate on the death index. Sadly, he wasn't born there. So how to know which birth record was his? The index available to me would show his name, his mother's maiden name, location of birth, and the quarter of the year he was born in. Was that enough? No! The index doesn't even narrow down male and female..... what if his name is misspelled? What if he's actually James Kenneth, not Kenneth James? It didn't specify month nor day of birth. No father's information! And I didn't have his mother's name, so how would I know which maiden name was hers?

After we get "good" at genealogy, it's actually very easy for us to fall into what is usually a "newbie" mistake: attaching records that are close enough without researching them. There was a birth close to his death location..... I could add that one and assume his family didn't move far. Or, I could make a map. I took each maiden name and searched for marriage records. I found the names of the husband/wife and where they were married. I then found them in the 1911 census (alone or married). I then tried to find their death index entry. I could now see who had moved and who had stayed put. Couple #1 never left Yorkshire, already had tons of kids by 1911, and didn't fit Ken's life (spent mostly around London). Couple #2 wasn't too far outside Kent, but never left their little town either. Couple #3, however, started south of London, and moved slowly North and West to where Ken ended up living most of his adult life. I was pretty sure I had the right folks. I also searched birth entries for other children with that mother's maiden name and was able to find possible siblings who were born either where Ken was born or where Ken lived later in life. I've tasked my fiance with original records gathering, but I feel that the initial work is good.

I'm also really excited by all this research. My family has mostly been in the US for hundreds of years. My last immigrant ancestor is from Scotland. Something like England, but not the same. I am feeling the thrill of being a new researcher again. I am not only having to learn about his family's life, but my fiance's country as well. I mean, I've learned the basics to be sure. But now I've got to really understand the county lines, the privacy rules, the records available, the records lost, wars fought, illnesses suffered......... I'm at the beginning of the beginning all over again. I can do US research in my sleep. I am fairly good at Scottish research. But England? And Wales? Please. Fish out of water time, my friend. Suddenly, I'm attacking history books. I'm searching out wiki pages. I'm rewatching old videos from Crista Cowan's learning series. I love Crista. I watch all her videos, even when I don't need that specific topic. At least I think I don't. But I usually get reminded about a little trick that will help me in my regular work. Or I later remember that I saw a video that will help me with my new work. Like this new venue of family research. Crista has videos dealing with how to use UK records and next steps. Some of the tricks are the same the world over, but other's aren't. My fiance did ask me why I wasn't done yet and I just laughed. When I told him it wasn't the same kind of research, he said, "sure it is." No, it isn't.

Every branch is a new journey with an old friend.
-Ana