Tuesday, October 16, 2018

New Terms: Adult Orphans and Family Tree Completists

Learned two new terms today from reading Post and Times:

"Adult orphans".  This refers to those of us, including me and my wife, who are getting old with no children, no parents, and essentially no support network.  Applying a label makes the problem seem more concrete.  Personally, on the one hand I'm tempted to say: "you made your bed, now lie in it." On the other hand, which I almost always have available, it's a real problem for us, and we need to figure out how to deal with it, most likely by moving to an assisted living complex which includes nursing care.  BTW, googling the term results in 45,000  hits, so it's not that new.

"Family tree completists" is unique to the Times article on the ability of a site called "GEDmatch" to help identify suspects in a crime from their DNA by analyzing DNA matches from a database of relationships created by genealogical enthusiasts.  For a while I was one of these--deriving great pleasure from adding another set of (remote) cousins to my genealogy.  I still maintain an ancestry.com account, with a number of trees which someday I may return to

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