Thursday, August 7, 2008

The Genea-blogger Games are ON!

My first thought when I saw the announcement of the Genea-Bloggers Genealympic Games was "that's nice - it's something I can do in my spare time - maybe after watching two weeks of the Olympic Games in China." Well - not exactly!

Miriam Midkiff on her Ancestories: Stories of My Ancestors blog announced the Genea-Blogger Group Olympic Games events, and these games are a bit strenuous for a typical armchair genea-blogger like me. There is a badge to be worn on all Genea-blogger posts (created by the footnoteMaven, who has a knack for these things):


Each participant was asked to create a flag for the Opening Ceremonies using the tool on http://www.wearemulticolored.com/ to create and then save it. The tool only lets you use the flags of three countries, so I chose England, Canada and the United States. England is the "mother country" for almost all of my colonial ancestors and the mother country of the USA and Canada. I have a few Canadian ancestors, and many colonial American ancestors and USA-born ancestors. So here is my flag:



Now then, which Genealympics events to compete in? There are five different events, but my time is limited by several factors (the grandsons are coming on 19 August). Therefore, I'm going to choose two events to compete in. Here are the Genealogist's Pentathlon events and my choices:

1) Go Back and Cite Your Sources! -- this is not one of my genealogical strengths, meaning that it should be easy to rack up a medal here if I were to compete. But I'm not going to compete here because I'm not that good at it.

2) Back Up Your Data! -- This is a worthy event, but I have too much "stuff" to sort through, scan, back up and archive to compete for the top medals here. I do some of these things routinely.

3) Organize Your Research! -- I will compete in this event because I need to do these tasks routinely and the targets are achievable in the time I have available.

4) Write! Write! Write! -- I'm not going to compete in this event, even though I do several of these tasks routinely. I can't pre-publish with my current blogging platform (I know, I should use New Blogger).

5) Reach Out and Perform Genealogical Acts of Kindness -- I will compete in this event, since I have several projects on my research plate.

Miriam Midkiff, Kathryn M. Doyle and Thomas MacEntee have put this Genea-bloggers Games together, showing much common sense and good humor. My thanks to them for taking the time to work together for the benefit of many, including the participants.

UPDATED 3 p.m.: I was informed that I shouldn't use the word "Olympics" because of restrictions on the use of the word... I changed almost all of the instances where I used it. Maybe if we spelled it differently - Genlympics? Genealympics? Surely they won't object, right? Let's see if that works. I love making up new words or phrases.

3 comments:

Miriam Robbins said...

Thank you for promoting the Games, Randy, and especially for your participation.

Two small but important corrections:

1) We are not using the word "Olympics" because only the International Olympic Committee and the Special Olympics can use that name. We will be referring to them as "the Games."

2) The Genea-Bloggers Group administrators have put these Games together. Besides myself, this includes Thomas MacEntee and Kathryn Doyle. The footnoteMaven kindly created the participation badge and the medals for our use in the Games, but was not an integral part of the set up in the rules and events.

We're so excited to have so many people join us...and for those who are unable to, we appreciate your encouragement and promotions!

Mel said...

Thanks for posting about the games, Randy. It sounds like fun! I'll be participating on my Research Journal blog.

Miriam Robbins said...

Randy, I appreciate how you took the time to go back and make all the corrections.

We should have made it clear in our Announcement about the wording of "Games" vs. "Olympics."

And it is not obvious that Kathryn is not one of the creators of the Games, because she did not post the Announcement of them on her blog. She didn't feel it was appropriate, because it is a society, not a personal, genealogy blog.

We're so glad to have you along!