The Coast with the Most

With humble and due respect to those loved ones and others who live Back East–-and grateful acknowledgment of the power and glory and seasons and winters and cold and Body-n-Soul warming companies like L.L. Bean and everything else about the Eastern Seaboard–-I must bask in not a little bit of California Pride.

The graphic you see above is a slice of a bigger picture I made in response to a school assignment brought home by my son consisting of nine interview questions about when people in his family came to California. Hot diggity! At last! Something that all my time in hallowed and local research institutions and this stuff is actually directly intended to amplify, afford revealing views into, and otherwise make for at least a little fun in discovering. Perhaps even in allowing the people to whom it’s presented to see for themselves the actual nuts ‘n’ bolts and very fibers of connections between people, ideas and events that are the real fruit of the quests genealogickal and historickal.

Thanks to my ex’s great-grandparents–-Giovanni Mazzoni, from Como, Italy, and Gemma La Franchi, from Coglio, Switzerland coming to California, meeting and having a family among whom was their daughter Eva born here in 1906–my kids are 4th generation Californians. Interestingly, through me–-thanks to my dad having been born in England–-they also fit into a demographic category known as 3rd generation immigrant.

Anyway, I checked out my son’s questions for the school assignment–-things like, when did they arrive? how? when? from where? and a little about what things were like when they got here. I drew out by hand the tree, indicating by circling or such who what etc. Then I realized this could be a lot better NOT in my handwriting, u-hem, and so went to town doing the above graphic.

I started with getting a 3D family tree using MacFamily Tree. (Which, btw, if you’re on a Mac, it’s the ONLY family tree program that needs to be discussed; if you’re on a PC, welp, if you’re as into genealogy as I am, then you need to become a Mac person so you can use this program. If you’re on a PC and are going to stay that way, that’s fine, cuz eventually the PC programs always end up incorporating/copying the graphically friendly and usable aspects of Mac programs that remain the defining feature of the Mac and its software. Anyhoo…maybe I’m just a softy for 3D stuff, but the 3D view of one’s family tree is so so SO cool; it brings it to life.) So I started with spinning the tree I’d made to an angle I thought would be appropriate to convey the generations (all the names, I realized, weren’t going to be necessary, but being able to visually differentiate the generations and such would be).

Then I went online and found some of the elements, others I had already, and there ya have it.

Up top is, as I said, a slice. The whole thing is below.