When you’ve been spending a few hours familiarising yourself with ancestral family members and calculating ages from dates in the 18th century, then you look at your computer’s clock to check the time and see “2010″ at the end of it, you can’t help but be amazed you’re in the future! (xkcd was so right)
Because your database has corrupted, virtually every event in your family happened in Reddish, Stockport. You start to wonder whether Reddish actually contains an anomaly spewing time and space itself.
Browsing a census list for an 1841 prison (out of morbid curiosity) you see ages of 13 and 14 years old in-mates and babies born to prisoners only a few weeks old still with their parent, in prison. You wonder, where did society go wrong after this?
Going back to the 1700′s you see names become warped and contorted as your journey through time travels beyond the barrier of universal education and standardised spelling. You compare this with the average sentence written by a modern teenager and can see how there were 200 years of light where English made sense and worry that now we’re heading back into darkness..
Even years into your research it’s still surprising how infant mortality was so high it must’ve been a fact-of-life up until not really that long ago at all, so strange you can’t really get over it. You can’t imagine any 4/5 years olds your know just dying from “normal” causes now but it happened all the time, to almost every family.
It pains you that you owe years of work you’ve been saved from to a guy who still updates an immensely comprehensive and useful web site hard-coded in HTML 3.0 as it was when he started 15 years ago! How can any website that looks like it was a Geocities throw-back be so damn useful!?
You wonder whether in 200 years time someone will look you up in the census and plan your 2011 entry accordingly. Is it “Jedi” this time around or “Metal”?
