This blog is...

I am a genealogist by nature and before you fall asleep let me just say a couple of things about why I am writing this blog and why I hope you find it interesting. Ready?
I have wanted to do a project and so many things in genealogy seem to be taken that I thought I would see where my frustrations with genealogy lie. It didn't take long but it crossed my mind that every time I saw a scanned newspaper, so many of the indexes extracted from them were terrible. Many were so irrelevant that I spent most of my time sorting through the terrible indexes only to find the names I was looking for was not a name at all, or pieces of two different names. I am sure some of you can identify with that.
Considering that there are now thousands of newspapers now online and some of them only in part, I thought better indexing would be a good project to work on. If I indexed from the newspaper with my own two eyes, I think I would have a vastly superior product than the OCR indexes. OCR or Optical Character Recognition may read the text but no matter how good you get, it cannot adequately "reason" what it reads and categorize the information it finds. That is how you get search "hits" from a search looking for "John Smith" and you get a hit on a line of text reading "...Matthews, James Madsen, Henry Smith, John Smedshammer..." The computer thought that was a match. However, you, at a glance can see it is not a match and there you have it -- the first big problem and frustration I have had with OCR. However, if an index was created by a reasonalbly good looking and reasonably well-educated human reading, reasoning, and interpreting, it would have fewer errors in it.
OK so that is what I am doing. So why the blog?

I expect to come across a lot of wisdom, knowledge, cultural tidbits, and stories that explain the myth of the 19th Century LDS culture in Utah. I like to muse on what I read and so I want to write a blog on my musings. Gimme a chance. I like writing humorously, not unlike Dave Barry and hope to draw such an interest.
I love feedback as well so feel free to post comments as you like. Good and bad, just not vulgar please. Leave the swearing to my kids who are learning new ones at school everyday.
I really feel that our future can be found in our history as those who are the most steady in their lives are those who have a firm grasp on who they are and where they have come from. I look to find it there, in the past, so I can have a brighter future.