The Wrong Question

Yesterday was a magically palindromic 20,202 days since the inauguration of Jack Kennedy as the 35th president of the USA.  (For the many who won't bother to work it out, I'll tell you that was on 20th January 1961.)  His inaugural speech, one of the shortest in history, contained words that made the occasion famous, "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."  It's these words that give me my thread for this week's post.  He was correcting them lest they should be asking the wrong question.

It's a thought that has occured to me a number of times this week.  The first was when I had an online disagreement with a friend about the coming EU referendum.  Upon discovering that we were on opposite sides of the debate we exchanged a couple of salvos as I tried - unsuccessfully - to persuade him that Kennedy's philosophy (although I didn't call it that) applied to this matter all these years later: it's just as important to realise what we can do for Europe as to consider what Europe can do for us.

Enough politics.  The next occasion arose when I subjected myself to a (free ... which is why I did it!) online tutorial about the use of Microsoft Excel. Having used spreadsheets both for employers and for myself over many years, I reckon I have a pretty good knowledge of this program.  However, I have many 'known unknowns' (to quote another famous American), and I reckon there are far more 'unknown unknowns' out there, that I know nothing about, and will never need to.

This particular webinar related to the production of a 'dashboard', a one-screen display of the key facts of a situation.  At the end of it, I was convinced that I had a pretty good use for some of these techniques, using a facet of Excel that I've only dabbled with thus far, the pivot table.  Having struggled with it for some hours this morning, it is now my belief that I was asking the wrong question ... or at least I have now discovered a solution to a problem that I don't yet face.  Meanwhile, my present problem doesn't require this particular technique to solve it.

This afternoon found me at one of the year's three meetings of the West London branch of the Suffolk Family History Society.  Earlier in the week our secretary had sent round an e-mail advising us that the arranged speaker for today had been admitted to hospital, and was unable to be with us.  Instead, she suggested, we might each make a contribution to an article for the Society's website explaining why there should be a branch of a Suffolk society in west London or, put another way, how and why had our ancestors come to be living in London instead of Suffolk.

I had dismissed the matter as not particularly relevant to me, since only a few stray 'twigs' of my distant cousins had settled in London; by far the greater number who had migrated had gone to the industrial areas of Lancashire, and a few to the coal mines of the north-east.  It wasn't until the discussion got under way that I realised that I'd missed the point completely.  I did have a contribution to make, albeit a very small one.

It transpired that only two of the gathering had themselves been born in the county, but had been brought to the metropolis by their families and had grown up there (however, one lady had been old enough by then to have acquired the local accent, which she has never lost).  I was born in Norfolk, but of parents born and bred in Suffolk, so the accent I learned as I grew up was more Suffolk than Norfolk, even if I didn't realise that until much more recently.  Out of us all, I was the only one who had actually made the migration myself ... although I hadn't considered my journey to north Hertfordshire to be a migration to London.  In the context of this blog, I had pre-answered the wrong question.

Before the discussion about migration, I had been ensconced with my friend Jean over our two computers, engaged in each other's problems.  She had been trying to find out why Windows 10 wouldn't allow her to search the society's many parish register transcription CDs.  Both I and another member had been able to explain how this could be achieved.  The critical question was not 'why not?', but 'how?'.

Conversely, I had mentioned the difficulty posed by a young man named Herbert, who had died in 1885 at the age of about 15.  In his short lifetime, he had appeared on two censuses and in each case was living with his grandparents.  They had had many children, but I had decided that I shouldn't be able to find out which of these was his father until I'm able to visit the local record office to find his baptism.  Jean was able to suggest another route by which I might discover this key link to the rest of my tree.

After all these mis-alignments of problems and solutions, questions and answers, I'm not sure how I shall go about the challenges of the next week ... but I'm sure some of the answers will find their way here.