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Indulge me for a moment - one of the interesting things about family history is that it is mostly the re-discovery of the commonplace. The family historian is not out to dream up something new, but to use a process I think as being like memory. I don't want to get into the heads of my ancestors (that would be about as interesting as being in my own head) but to see them from the outside, at close range.
Because we live at an ever-increasing distance from our ancestors, it becomes more and more difficult to do this. 1997 is only a variation of 1996; 1996 is only a variation of the year before. For us to try to summon up life in 1850 or 1750 involves undoing all the years in between. Our times, if they are like the times of our ancestors at all, are only us yearning to go back to something that never really existed. We seek to change the things of our own time that distress us, whilst assuming that the things we like about the present are constants. Thanks for the simpler life, but I don't want to know about small-pox.
I use software to organise my family history research because it lets me centre on a person, then look at all the people around them. I look for things that happened to the people close to that person, and try to imagine the effect on them. How do you feel when your son dies? When your wife is 10 years younger? When your daughter has a bastard son? The point is no-one knows the exact effect, but you can be sure the effect was significant. I can only relate that these things happen, and hope that somehow out of all this a picture will emerge of a person's life.
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