"In the beginning..."

I've been kicking around ideas for some time of resurrecting my various web sites and blogs. They've been neglected for far too long, even though I've still been pursuing each of the interests that were displayed on them. This blog is one example of that. I am still very actively researching my family's history, but I haven't posted here regularly in quite some time. 

This year one of my goals is to put out more posts on each of the web properties where I have a presence. On this blog specifically, among other posts that I come up with, I'll be adding posts based on the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks series of prompts suggested by Amy Johnson Crow. This week's prompt is "In the beginning..."; but for me, this is not the beginning, it is the relaunch.

Since I was last regularly active on this blog, I've become a grandfather, making my family history research all the more meaningful for me. I'm hopeful that one of my grandchildren, or maybe one of their spouses, will be interested in pursuing this research further and can pick up where I will eventually leave off.

My research journey started in the 1980s by working on a brief family history report for one of my middle school assignments. The project was called a "heritage report" rather than a family history or genealogy report, even though that was exactly what I was assigned. I forget exactly which class it was in, but I have a vague memory that it was English class (which was usually the name we used for classes about literature and writing) rather than history class. The assignment was designed to teach research techniques and how to organize the results into a cohesive report. Once I got into high school, there was another research report I worked on that further expanded on researching and writing a longer report, but I'll save that for another day.

For my report, I remember interviewing both of my grandmothers. They were both frequent visitors in my house, so it was easy for me to talk to them. My grandfathers however... one had passed before I was born and the other had basically tried to distance himself from my family entirely out of spite, so I never met either of them. My parents helped me write and send letters to other family members to answer the questions to build my first pedigree chart. I didn't quite learn as much about doing the research as my teachers probably hoped I would, and I feel like I would have totally bombed on this project if my parents weren't as involved as they were. The assignment did spark my interest in genealogy, so for that I'm forever grateful to my teacher so long ago. I still have that report in my archives, but it's kind of buried right now. If I can dig it out, I'll edit this post to add a picture of it.

I didn't do very much research at all for a while, as other interests were pursued more vigorously. When I got married, I asked for family history information from my wife's family, first so I could find out how close our cousin lines met up, but then also just to learn more about them. More than 30 years later, I'm now picking up where her grandmother and mother have gotten to and adding more information that I'm able to find with the resources I can access. I've also gotten a start on my daughter-in-law's and my brother-in-law's family history, adding that information into my ever growing database of family research results.

That's how I started.