At Geneamusings, Randy Seaver has issued this challenge for us:
Your mission, should you decide to accept it (and we need more of you to do this, otherwise it may end...), is to:
1) Read Brenda Joyce Jerome's post Who or What Do You Blame? on the Western Kentucky Genealogy blog. She asks these questions:
* Can you identify person or event that started you on this search for family information?
* Did you pick up researching where a relative had left off?
* Did your interest stem from your child's school project on genealogy?
* If you have been researching many years, it may be hard to pinpoint one reason for this journey.
2) Write your responses on your own blog, in a comment to this blog post, or in a note or comment on Facebook.
I’m usually so busy on Saturday nights doing my own research that I seldom take time to write about it, using Randy’s ‘Saturday Night Genealogy Fun’ prompts. But I’ve already added two new posts to my blog today and spent several hours last night researching, so it’s time for fun tonight.
I’m proud to say it was my husband, Larry Jamison, who started me on this quest of researching our ancestors. He prodded, suggested, hinted, encouraged, reminded, and prodded some more. I flatly refused for several years. Of course I knew what genealogy was, as my mother had always taken great pride in “keeping track” of family and my dad, along with my step-mom and grandmother, were members of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia and attended annual conventions. And my dad’s been an “obituary clipper” for many years. But I had no interest in even hearing about conventions or reading obituaries.
After I’d known Larry for a couple of years, I finally yielded to his “begging” and let him take me to the local Family History Center to see what information, if any, we could find about my grandparents. To my total shock, their names were in the computer system and that submission led me to unknown cousins many years later.
It was 7 years after that visit to the Family History Center when I finally got back to the research. My son gave my dad the Family Tree Maker software for Christmas one year. Dad did nothing with it, so I installed it and thought I’d only enter what I’d included in my son’s baby book. That’s funny now that I look back on it…to think I was going to enter 4 generations and STOP! Laugh out loud!
The research on my own family was fresh….I gathered what I knew, what my dad could add, and started the deeper “dig” 10 years ago. However, a good foundation of research into my husband’s ancestry had been done by his first wife, who’d researched about 5 generations 25 years prior to me picking it up and continuing with it.
Thank you to Larry, for allowing me to “blame” you for encouraging me to just give genealogy a try; thank you to my dad for helping me piece the names of my own family together; thank you to hundreds of other relatives for contributing to my findings, and thank you to Randy Seaver, for the suggestion for my source of genealogy fun this Saturday night!
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