Frank Beacon: Peripheral Vision

Within a couple of seconds an error flag popped up in my "conscious" mind. I was in Utah, not California or Texas or any other place noted for its Spanish/Mexican architecture, so I couldn't have seen such a building. I took another look, directly at the structure this time, clearly seeing it for what it was: a grain elevator.

Most of the grain elevators I remember seeing have been white, but this one was brown beige, and the general outline of its triple towers could (if you weren't paying close attention) evoke the mind-image of the top of a California-style bell tower. Of course, the grain elevator was far too tall to be what I thought I saw in the periphery of my original vision, but my mind had tried to match part of the pattern to something else, and even a partial match seemed to please it.

This sort of thing seems to happen to me quite a bit. Like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, I seem to perceive partial patterns that I try to match up with previous experiences.

During any research process, I find almost every record littered with clues. Some of these are more or less "chaff": items that repeat from one document to the next, or are serial (like page numbers), or which in other ways fail to grasp my interest. Others are more like "wheat", containg the type of data I'm looking for: names, dates, places, etc.

The difficulty is separating the wheat from the chaff. Honestly, if you are reading a lot of documents you just can't read every word on every page, or your mind will go numb and you wind up reading ten pages before you realize you haven't seen a thing. You have to choose what you will concentrate on, and leave the rest to your peripheral vision.

Choosing the direction for your "tunnel vision" is the easy part. If you're reading indexes you can focus on the surname and given name. The same often holds true for reading unindexed lists, such as censuses or passenger lists. The hard part is deciding what you will look for on the periphery. Will you also pay attention to the ages on a census? Or to the places of origin on a passenger list? Will you only look for the surname Beacon, or will you also consider the Beecon, Beakan and Bacon spelling variations?

On some occasions you may find yourself reading a record that is mostly unfamiliar to you in format. This could be a record written in a foreign language, or a church register that varies somewhat from other registers you've used previously. When you encounter an unfamiliar format, you first have to spend some time decoding the format to be sure you understand what you can consider "chaff" rather than wheat.

You can never exclude every piece of data, because all of it will eventually be important to you. So prepare yourself by having a dictionary at hand if you're reading foreign language records, or a legal dictionary for court documents. Even a good Webster's can be helpful in decoding some of the unfamiliar terms in older documents.

Whenever you come across something that you don't fully understand, take the time to learn about it. A word or phrase that seems nonsensical in the context you find it may have an entirely different meaning than you expected. Learning the true meaning can help direct you in your research, and knowing what it means will definitely increase your understanding of your ancestors.

Frank Beacon

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