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Sunday, February 1, 2015

Luck in research

It has been yet another busy week at work. My schedule is more strict than before. I attend the internal desk in the stacks every Tuesday, where I take care of the books that don't have bar codes, distribute the requested books to the different locations and answer incoming e-mails from patrons. That's a lot of work and I have to be there all day. Wednesdays I drive the storage round and Thursdays I have desk duty.

Friday we had a small party for yet another retiring colleague. She was my boss for many years and  will be missed. She told me she had started to do family history research, which is a typical activity for retirees here. I cheered her on, of course.

The newly found relative and I have been exchanging photos for a while now. I was pretty surprised to get two sketches made by Arndt from her. All this has raised more questions and we have both been doing more research. Her great grandmother had four brothers in America, which I found information about a few years ago, so I sent her that. This project is getting bigger and bigger, but it's really interesting.

This weekend I have been at work to do research. I have received cut-out articles from old newspapers about a shipwreck in 1907 (Arndt's brother-in-law was the captain). Arndt's nephew had found them and sent them to me. But it didn't say what newspaper it was or any kind of date. It must be a local newspaper from Halmstad and sometime between 1931 and 1949. I started with 1931 today. It takes an entire day to go through the microfilms for one year, so this will be a long term project if I ever finish it. I didn't find what I was looking for, but something much more interesting - Arndt had written several articles in this newspaper about his visits to Eastern Europe in the 1920s. I have so far found four. No one had any idea about this. It's remarkable that his articles would be in the newspaper for 1931. I was incredibly lucky.

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