If you’ve been following this site - at any point - and have ready any of my previous posts, or even my about page, you know that my research was really started by my maternal grandmother. That woman was the backbone of my family. The matriarch. She connected everyone so deeply - her siblings, her children, their children...cousins, aunts, uncles...everyone. She remembered her own heritage and she preserved what she could because it was important to her. I began researching MY family when I realized that I knew basically nothing about this strong, caring woman. I started asking questions. I recorded her and my grandfather. I realized that not only did I want to know as much as she could tell me about her family (her memories and experiences), I also wanted to
I have always tried to have a multi-faceted approach to doing family history. In my own discovery of the unexpected, I often try to look not only at the ancestors who have come and gone before me, but also at my living relatives. I read a blog earlier today that expressed concern that we, genealogists, often get too caught up in the details. We focus too much on abbreviations or small details in documents. I wonder if we sometimes don’t get too caught up in the dead. We find pictures or records or heirlooms from the people who came before us and it lights a fire underneath us. We crave MORE. These things are a way that we can connect to the departed. We can put faces on the lost, and by doing so we can preserve their legacy for the next generation. This is wonderful. How many people would be forgotten without us? But, this also leads me to question: what do I do NOW to preserve as much as I can about my living relatives so that the quest for the researchers after me will be different?
If you’ve been following this site - at any point - and have ready any of my previous posts, or even my about page, you know that my research was really started by my maternal grandmother. That woman was the backbone of my family. The matriarch. She connected everyone so deeply - her siblings, her children, their children...cousins, aunts, uncles...everyone. She remembered her own heritage and she preserved what she could because it was important to her. I began researching MY family when I realized that I knew basically nothing about this strong, caring woman. I started asking questions. I recorded her and my grandfather. I realized that not only did I want to know as much as she could tell me about her family (her memories and experiences), I also wanted to
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The BloggerI love family history and the various ways that it can be approached by researchers! I hope that this blog is interesting and inspiring!
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