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Sara 🏳️‍🌈

@saralovesyou.bsky.social

1.6K followers 380 following 4.8K posts

Minneapolis, nonsense, higher ed, tech, genealogy, and Minnesota in general. PhD in education. Have been called “secretly nice.” Saved a child care center, ran a tech conference. I make excellent pierogi and strudel.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · Sep 3

Hey look! I have a website now. It will have other things eventually, but for right now it has three posts about what I'm calling the St. Paul Death Register Project.

More will come--including MN-specific genealogy work.

Syndicate & Hague

Digging into Minnesota genealogy and history, and how our past still affects us today.

www.syndicateandhague.com

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1h

Fine, but not totally accurate. Only one grandparent was from the region. My other large chunk, Irish, is now basically chunks that cover the whole island. That tracks.

Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1h

Unrelated to anything important, ancestry updated their regions and I think they really struggle with Eastern Europe. Granted, I can’t find everyone, but I have so many people in the same Slovenian town that have it’s kind of weird.

Now it’s very heavy on the northwest balkans, which is fine.

Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1h

I need to make my blog less spare. It needs a logo, but I could just let it be text and not care. Also need to keep the DFL letter only on pages about my family when I start writing about my grandfather. I simply have no design energy at present.

Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1h

*travel back in time with me.

Autocorrect hates grammar. I also have a Croatian keyboard on here too so I keep getting mixed up.

Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1h

I’ve been sidelined by parent duties and dual citizenship prep this week, and finishing my first MN political genealogy post (gov Perpich). But my next death register post will be on one of the few who died of “old age” and we’ll see how the rest of that family fared…

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1h

Oh. Well then.

We’re really hurtling back to the dark ages. Travel back in with me as I write about how individual people and families died.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 6h

It does have more info—it’s the steps involved for making it formal (and the duplicativeness) that is eating up my time and patience.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 7h

I’ve spent probably 90 minutes on the phone about various vital records-related stuff for the last two weeks and then additional time and unnecessary expense in person and I think I’m going to lose my mind.

Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 7h

Each needs its own apostille stamp.

Build into this process being told that the county cannot do it, calling, getting told it can, getting questions about whether that’s what you actually need, etc.

Why did we make this so hard in 2023??

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 7h

Anyone applying for something like dual citizenship needs more than what is on our standard forms.

So what you have to do now is:
1. Get the certified copy
2. Get a non-certified copy
2a. Print out a memo saying that MN has no certified long form records
2b. Go get this packet notarized

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 7h

I don’t know why MN stopped issuing “long form” birth certificates, but let me tell you—not enough people working at the service centers know that people need and can get non-certified images or whatever (I get to return to get one after being told they couldn’t).

Was there a state statute change?

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 12h

Fun fact—my dad took me to go see Gorbachev (speak? Something?) when he was here then and we didn’t make it because I was running and hit a hole in the ground and sprained my ankle.

I am a nerd and clumsy.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 12h

I think that’s the thing I’m maddest at the mayor and the more conservative wing of our city for doing. The mayor didn’t need to use that time as a way to scare people during the 2021 election. That was a choice and the city’s residents have been paying for it. So we already have that as baseline.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 12h

Lastly. The more people you know who are directly affected, the more presence an event has in your life, the more you’re going to be reactive. We’ve never had a real healing process post-Floyd’s murder and everything that stemmed from that. It immediately turned into a politically exploited event.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 12h

The number of false alarms we had after that day are too numerous to count. Running out of the subway because of a suspicious bag, repeatedly having to get up and go outside because a bomb threat was called into where I worked/went to school. It keeps everyone on edge (in their own unique ways).

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 13h

2. The more intense the experience, the more easily panic sets in. The more visible the reminders of the threat are, the more your baseline ongoing level of anxiety keeps you ready to snap.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 13h

For instance, my weird reaction is stupor, plus feeding people, quickly figuring out needs, plus panicking over something entirely unimportant (9/11 was primary Election Day and I was like—I don’t think they can cancel! Of course they did. But again, shock is weird.)

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 13h

1. Shock is super weird. People behave in different ways. Panic, stupor/confusion, trying to fix/organize, high emotions (the highs of people surviving/freak outs of people not being reached), appearing calm. All normal. What you do/feel will not be what others do.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 13h

I’m just going to share a few things I learned going through 9/11 and how stress/shock/trauma affects you because as ICE spins up and tries to get away with as much as possible in harming people, it’s going to be hard and everyone is going to have a huge range of responses.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 13h

Yeah, I think that’s a good idea. I’d also like to know what city/county/state officials need from us in order to prosecute people grabbing people off the street (I believe Pritzger asked residents to get as much footage as possible).

Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 13h

Kmart on one side, Target on the other, Walmart with a connected skyway on both sides. Battle royale.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 13h

People thought I was nuts to buy everyone on my block without them fire extinguishers, organize overnight shifts, force a construction guy to move his pile of bricks, and prepare a large kiddie pool of water in 2020. But a building burned down 2 blocks away that night. I’m all about being ready.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 13h

It’s incumbent on officials and reporters to get facts straight; also the lack of trust (even if it is mild distrust over severe distrust) in public safety functions is something the city needed to be working on hard for the last five years. Mayor plays political games about crime, distrust ensues.

Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 13h

I think that it’s very scary, people are going to react, and everyone living through this gets some grace. It’s not unreasonable for you to get very concerned about overlapping problems—you’re a resident, not an official or reporter. It’s harder to experience it first hand than observe more remotely

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

It’s unfair that I’ve always floated with no effort in a pool. I can float standing up, have always been able to. It always made swimming easier. Is it fair that Phelps has a pair of flippers for feet? Nope. Or that he physically recovers from races faster than normal people. His biology is unfair.