Jan Murphy

A reminder to the news media: “conflicting accounts” is what you say BEFORE the incontrovertible video evidence appears. After that, your job is to ask why one side is lying, not to repeat the lie and pretend no one knows the truth.

I have a name, a location, possibly a street address and occupation, but not always. Genealogy software is particularly bad when your main idea of someone's age is "how old did he have to be, to be an executor" and little more. Maybe the person is a peer of the deceased, maybe not.

Right now I am working through the wills I ordered back in November before the Probate Search service for England and Wales did a price increase, so I'm correlating the information in the wills with records collected during prior work. Often my first research Q is to identify the executor.

You could also write a fresh research report and note it is an update of your prior analysis, etc.

... and note your updated thoughts there. It feels less cumbersome than laboriously unpicking the conflated families on the computer where everything is attached and has to be unattached etc.

Let's say you were looking at a group of records which you believed belonged to all one family, and you discover new evidence that reveals two families have been conflated. With a paper system, you sort the slips into two batches, use the cross-references to go back to the sources in your journal

I have an older copy of RootsMagic but I haven't looked at it in a long time (changed computers etc. I won't bore you with the details). When I was doing linguistics, we built a paper slip file which indexed the data in our field notes. That system felt more fluid than using a computer. 🧵

#Genealogy software is, by design, a system to store the evidence you've already made conclusions about. The question I had when I first started doing research, which no one has answered to my satisfaction, is where you are supposed to store the "multiple maybes" which you haven't decided yet.

connorstorrieoff... V and 2 others Follow • • • FEB 28 CONNOR STORRIE MUMFORD ·SONS 123K 4,337 / 3,569

AND CONNOR STORRIE IS HOSTING SNL?!

I can’t handle multiple pieces of good news this close together!

GIVE HIM HIS HAT AND BACKPACK BACK YOU GHOULS

I can’t stress this enough. The state of 4th Amendment law is that the cops can’t force you to type in a passcode but they can force you to swipe your finger or present your face. Never stop using passcodes/passwords to unlock your devices. And consider additional code to unlock Signal.

The calendar for the first three months of 2026, with today, Saturday, January 31, highlighted. February begins on Sunday and lasts for exactly four weeks, ending on Saturday.

We have a perfect Rectangular February coming up, first time we’ve had one since 2015

Maybe this is what finally closes the loop and fixes the world

Reminded of the time that a BBC World Service presenter asked their guest how long there had been a Latino presence in Los Angeles and I yelled at my car stereo, “The name of the city is **LOS ANGELES**!”

screenshot from Amazon search results, showing a banner ad for A New Film: Melania, with search results underneath. The top result is the book Melania: Devourer of Men by J.D. Boehninger. The cover shows a dark-haired woman with fangs, claws, and bat wings. She is wearing a skimpy red top.

It's working!

Eviction moratoriums. Now.

Get in. We're messing up Melania's Amazon search results. This weekend, Amazon is premiering it's $40 million Melania Trump documentary. It already seems to be a flop. But we're going to take it one step further by messing up Melania's Amazon search results. Specifically, we're going to amplify the paranormal erotic thriller, Melania: Devourer of Men so it ranks higher than her movie. The book is perfect: it's absurd, the cover is ridiculous, and it's free, so we're not giving Amazon any money. We need people to: 1. "buy" the book (it's free) 2. Share this post and get other people to buy the book. That's it. Then we can celebrate as an erotic novel about a bat monster Melania Trump becomes a higher and higher search result on Amazon.

Okay troublemakers, punks, antifa supervillains, and anyone who just enjoys being a petty little shitbird while they fuck up the algorithm of a massive media corp. Here's your assignment for the weekend. Get on it and spread the word.

Discworld QOTD, from Jingo

When we went to see the film Michael Collins, a woman sitting behind us spent the entire film explaining the history of it to her son. One day I'd really like to rewatch the film and be able to pay attention to it, but what are the odds I'll be able to do so uninterrupted? Zilch.

Any renter knows this pitch is bogus. The price of a property or rental always goes up after you evict the current residents.

Find some point in the story where the audience will want to go on and find out what happens next, and suggest they watch until that timestamp, then pause & think about what they've seen so far before going on.

If it's not a round number, it won't be so obvious.

How can I resist cover copy like this?

"Packed with information, hilariously but accurately (well...except for the chickens) illustrated, Hannah Holt and Korwin Briggs' A History of Underwear with Professor Chicken is sure to wedge its way into the annals of history-based picture books."

Hockey, hecklers and taxidermy: Meet a Middle Georgia emergency goalie Bill Yox, a 65-year-old taxidermist from Monticello, recently got to suit up against the Macon Mayhem.

The sports team fans in my town are truly terrible. Just the most sour, rude-ass fans, no matter what sport you go to. It is mostly charmingly sincere, and that's why this story of a 65 year old local becoming emergency backup goalie for the other team is very funny. maconmelody.com/hockey-heckl...

#genealogy This is why I dislike the system of treating Find a Grave as a family tree and linking multiple people from a single memorial. It's too easy for users to link same-name people that aren't actually related.

#genealogy ... so I feel fairly certain the person is buried there, but it irks me. The photo is of a headstone, and refers to more than one person, so is it really a photo of a grave? It may be where the primary person is buried but I need to check the register to see if his wife is also there.

#genealogy Today when I was saving a memorial to a profile in a working tree for my #OnePlaceStudy, I looked at the photo to see the full credits and discovered that there is a now a field called "Photo Type". It was marked "Grave". This is in a churchyard in England and I've seen the register ...

#genealogy Because of this fundamental misunderstanding of how burials and memorials actually manifest in the real world, Find a Grave insists on having only one memorial per person, which leads to ownership wars and all sorts of problems.

And then there's the other alarming thing.

The Dark History of Cemeteries in San Francisco Before the City of San Francisco voted to stop burials within city limits in 1900, there were at least 30 cemeteries in use or abandoned here.

#genealogy This is a fundamental problem with Find a Grave, baked in from the very beginning of the site. The founder assumed that the relationship of burial to marker is one-to-one. Surprise! It is NOT. (There might be multiple burial sites if someone was moved.)

www.7x7.com/dark-history...

#genealogy rant of the day
I noticed recently that Ancestry changed the way Find a Grave memorials show up on a profile of an online Ancestry tree. they used to have a custom header, but now they show up as a Burial. Which *sounds* okay. But what if there's a memorial stone without a burial?

Apple & Google removed ICE tracking apps in their app stores.

TikTok reportedly suppressed videos criticizing ICE & the shooting of Alex Pretti.

Meta blocked Facebook groups tracking ICE & links to a database of agents that the government wants to keep secret.

Big Tech is enabling Trump's regime.

The number of times I was spared an eye injury because I wear glasses....