I started researching my family tree for a project in 5th grade. Having grown up a military child, living where the military sent us, which was never close to my extended family, the concept of aunts, cousins, and grandparents, was pretty foreign. Also since 3 of my 4 grandparents were deceased before I was born, there was no opportunity to even glimpse those mysteries of my ancestral past.
The project started with a pile of index cards (which I still have today), followed by asking my parents for all the details they could recall. Who did they marry? When were they born? Where do they live now? I was likely the only 13 year old excited to attend a 1994 reunion of my grandmother's cousins so I could start to put faces with the names on my lists.
In life before the Internet, my tree grew manually, in a very personal way, through one-on-one phone calls, or rare in-person visits. When AOL brought email to every personal PC, I could suddenly collect information from people overnight; I could drill my aunts and uncles for data, and expand beyond the confines of my parents' memories. Despite the slow speed of my modem and having to sharing the phone line with my teenage siblings, the web gave my tree new dimensions. Censuses came alive and started being loaded in lightning speed, and there was a dizzying amount of data at my finger tips, but layers were still missing to connect the dots. I took my first family history trip around 2000, hunting through old Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota cemeteries and combing through the precious records of Great Aunt Elaine and Great Aunt Betty.
Then, life paused the project. In 2003, my 24-year old husband was killed in a car accident, and I couldn't bring myself to key his death in to the tree, but I couldn't look at the tree and know it was missing the most life-changing date in my children's history.
And then at Christmas 2002, someone sent an intriguing email and I opened the tree once again. Slowly logging in the pile of materials accumulated and unlogged over the past decade. Again, life paused the project, when I lost my son a short 1.5 months later.
But something pushed me to order an Ancestry DNA kit in late October 2021, and with it came the inspiration I needed: 3 months of Ancestry for $1.
So I'm back! I've dusted off all the files saved to my PCs. Cleaned up the various trees that were started and stopped years earlier, and I'm exploring once again.
Coincidentally, my sister has also started a recent project about our immigration story, and so her questions have pushed me to start this blog and start sharing. I might stop this project again tomorrow, or 6 years from now, but there are people who are curious and want to learn about the treasures I've found, so this blog will start to bring all of this data outside my storage boxes and out to all of you.
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