Barbara Toby Stack's ZichronNote Columns
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ZichronNote: Journal of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society August 2024 Editor’s Column InDesign remains a challenge: next editor take note. The rose branchings leave arcs overhead, outlines of their origins and lineages, soon to be cropped My resolution: watch the moving lines, the shadows, the erasures. We are in the sleuthing business. My own genealogical research flowered in August. A year ago, after having done DNA testing with MyHeritage, I gave Ancestry a shot, and there they were, a branch of the Stacks, but from what source? It turned out to be from my great grandfather’s brother, but to reach that conclusion, oy, the twists and turns, dead-ends, genealogical favors, and lucky finds (in my own files). But now I have my new cousin Mario from Cuba! Look here for details. And I wonder whether, in striking the pose of a sleuth, we might be obscuring, deliberately or accidently, our other roles as menders of the torn, illuminators of the past, reflectors of the family shape back to itself. What do genealogists look like? Sometimes we are the quiet, black-clad puppeteers, pulling and weaving the strings, leaving a trail, but not a mess. We dart between the background and foreground, playing a role, reporting the process, revealing some of the tricks and obscuring others. The story can be told a thousand ways. It is we who judge the audience’s capacity for attention, detail, and complexity. And if we are really, really, lucky, we get to see the truth decay back into the shadows and mists, not just fading, but in discreet drop outs, errors, false convergences. That is also the truth, the meta of the matter. What does a future SFBAJGS Board member look like? Curious. Our Zoom Board meetings are open to interested members. Our next meeting is Sunday, November 10, 2024 at 10:00 am. For more information email Jeremy at president@sfbajgs.org. If I may again quote a Jewish philosopher: Pink: Barbara Toby Stack |
ZichronNote: Journal of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society May 2024 Editor’s Column InDesign terms its color sampling tool a pipette. And with that I’d like to announce that the software is just beginning to take a background shade in this enterprise. At last. The roses launch themselves over my patio as if to mingle with cousins on the other side! My resolution: cherish my own point of view. Barbara Toby Stack |
ZichronNote: Journal of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society December 2023 Editor’s Column Oh my, InDesign is a continuing challenge! I upgraded my version and finally found all the steps to making the links visible in all versions of Acrobat (I hope!); I solved more issues in linking images to text, and failed miserably in enabling right-to-left Yiddish text, though I did change to a bilingual version. Sigh. And the roses continue to reveal new branches of the family. Off with their heads! My resolution is resolve.
Barbara Toby Stack |
ZichronNote: Journal of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society November 2023 Editor’s Column For this issue I reached a modicum of comfort with InDesign, though in no way a mastery. And ever-so-slowly extended the annual pruning of my branching roses. These things take time, and my gratitude, in this season of thanks, is for time. your name here site:sfbajgs.org The most important is the search function of your computer’s OS. |
ZichronNote: Journal of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society September 2023 Editor’s Column For this issue I reached across time and reanimated the remnants of my facility with InDesign, survived my first bout with covid, which bit off about a month’s editing capacity, and began the annual pruning of my vining roses when I needed outdoor branchings. I mirrored the footers, learned how to make images flow with the text, wrangled tables, and ventured into Illustrator to jazz up an image. I also got my mtDNA tested and matched a longtime SFBAJGS member (not Janice). Our new/old Treasurer Dana Kurtz recently asked me for my thoughts on strengthening our Society. I responded that just as a family with a genealogy and family history can become more confident and potentially a stronger network for having a back story, so might an organization benefit from an accessible history with recognizable actors and accomplishments. I hope ZichronNote can continue to serve such a purpose. What does a child, a future genealogist look like? They might be a curious asker and listener, a photographer, a collector, a reporter, a writer, an organizer of events, people, information. Nurture them. What does a future SFBAJGS Board member look like? Look in the mirror. When people ask me about travel, I say that I prefer time travel. We genealogists routinely reach across time to document and interpret the past and to wrap our albums and genealogies and stories in such a fashion as to send them forward into the future with good prospects. I recently bought some acid-free and lignin-free paper, and dove backward into the ZichronNote archive for facts and inspiration. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been a great help in making available old versions of the SFBAJGS website. I might also mention here an invaluable finding aid for the current state of our Society’s website, and usable on almost any search engine and website is: search term(s) site:SFBAJGS.org Now it’s time to quote a Jewish philosopher: “Be Here Now.” I am enormously grateful to have found a place on the SFBAJGS team. It is a beautiful thing to have such colleagues as these. Barbara Toby Stack |
ZichronNote: Journal of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society May 2023 Editor’s Column For this issue I lost and found my ambition to be an editor, lost and found my facility with InDesign, and lost and found my love of genealogy. It’s as if I’d been called upon to renew my vows. I drifted into genealogy from being the ten-year-old who pointed her camera at any relation who would allow it; by listening to my mother narrate her scrapbooks and guiding me though maintaining my own collections; by asking what my first personal computer could do with the 20-foot tree which came down to me via my mother’s cousin; by learning that I didn’t have to guess, that there were answers to be had, many in nearby Oakland. By asking why. And as I began to explore the worlds of genealogy, I realized that trees offered a new way of looking at my matrixed world, that I could slither up the lines of ancestry and down the byways of laterals and gain unsuspected reflections and points of view. In a world dominated by misinformation, impatience, short-term thinking and anomie, genealogy offers a path, colleagues, guidance, and the possibility of meaning. We document our discoveries and processes. We strive to pass along enduring insights, memories, trees, and collections. Let me here suggest that an article published in ZN is a great gift to the family as well as a ticket into the future. ZichronNote is held by genealogy libraries worldwide. Genealogy is a field which invites and permits so many of us to be not only seekers, but also finders and revealers. Generosity and gallantry abound. There are so many ways to participate in the team sport which is genealogy. Take some responsibility for passing along the important stuff to the curious ones in the next generations. And you get to decide what’s important! Protect the roots, even their outlines. Be a librarian. Be a shepherd of our histories. Be an inspiration to youth. Play some role. There are many to choose from. Just do something! Wishing you all continued success in genealogy, a deep and worthy education Barbara Toby Stack |