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Tuesday, March 8, 2016

More research

I spent the weekend at work again. It was so interesting to review the family history research I couldn't stop. I have now gone through my mother's side of the family. Back in the 1990s when I did most of that research I never wrote down causes of death for my ancestors. It doesn't always say what they died of in the records but in most cases you can find out. I spent the weekend looking this up and it turned out to be sad statistics. Many of them actually reached old age but those who didn't died of tuberculosis or something similar. Often they didn't know the proper name for the illness (there were no doctors available until the 19th century) so they wrote the symptoms instead. Some women died giving birth and often the child didn't make it either. It was a harsh reality for many of my ancestors.

At work I lag behind with most things but particularly with the project of weeding the reference collection. I have done a lot of that the past few days. It is sometimes difficult to decide whether the book should stay on the shelf or be put in the stacks. But in some cases it is easy. I have found guides for internet searching printed 20 years ago. They were moved without any hesitation from my side.

This past Friday we attended a lecture on material handling. One would think that I would know how to handle a book by now but I was told to attend it. I failed the promise I made to myself to keep my mouth shut at this lecture. The lecturer suggested that we should spend one more hour on retrieving so that the books wouldn't risk being damaged. I asked where we would get that extra hour from. It amazed me that someone would actually say something like that. It's not like we have too little to do.

This Saturday I went to a grocery store outside Lund just to shop somewhere else than normal. I got some ground beef and made taco-style lunch boxes with it. One more success.

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