So I run a (much more active) side blog, focused on quotations: WIST.info (WIST = “Wish I’d Said That”). Quotations have been a labor of love for me for a lot of years, the close thing I have to a pure personal hobby.
I have about 3,000-odd people who I quote there, and for each I track name, birth/death date, a few words of biography, and an image. Because knowing who said something, when, and what their background is can be useful in understanding what was said. Also, I’m a history geek, so there’s that.
For the last month or so I’ve been slowly crawling through that list of quoted folk to confirm, for those of the contemporary era, if they are still alive. It’s kind of embarrassing (as an history geek) to cite someone who died five years ago with just his birth date. Unprofessional, you know.
(For the record, Wikipedia is an awesome resource for such things, and for a lot of things. I support it, and most Internet users should, too.)
Anyway, updating biography snippets to include death dates has been kind of disturbing, emotionally. I have to check everyone where I just have a birth date, no matter what it is. But I can, actuarially, make a few preliminary assumptions.
Folk born in the 1910s are almost certainly dead.
Folk born in the 1920s-30s are probably dead, but not necessarily. And not jumping to that conclusion is important, because I have a parent and a couple of in-laws that fall into that category and they are not dead and I do not want them to be, so I keep rooting (and keep wincing).
On the other hand, folk born in the 1990s (and later) are probably not dead … but they need to be checked any, because accidents, disease, drug abuse, etc. may very well have taken such people.
And then there are people in-between. Like, oh, say, myself, born in the 1960s. A majority are not dead (yet), but a disturbingly large minority are, again due to accidents, disease, abuse, or just an “early” death.
I have not reached my Biblical three-score-years-and-ten, and an still enough below the US average (esp. given my economic bracket) that it’s not too worrisome. But being reminded by research that Things Happen, and there are famous people born later than me who have gone to join the Choir Invisible is … not reassuring.
And that I have loved ones who are on the far side of those numbers, even less so.
One would think collecting quotations would be, like collecting stamps, an very cool and unemotional and non-risky passtime.
Apparently not.