I created this blog nearly 13 years ago. I intended to post about genealogy, both about my personal research and in general, but just never made time for it. Now, thanks to Amy Johnson Crow's #52ancestors initiative, I will at least get started.
Appropriately, the topic for week 1 is Start and I'm using that to cover how I got started with genealogy. It began when I was a child, with my mother's mother's Chambers family of Delaware County, Ohio. Like many families, this one had annual reunions. Unlike most, they had a president, secretary, and treasurer, and kept annual minutes of reunion attendees and births, marriages, and deaths over the preceding year.
There were always one or two people who were the de facto family genealogists. Each year they'd turn up with some new find, maybe some pictures, or a new branch, or a book. But often it was just a discussion and my mother would jot down notes, trying to keep up with the speaker. Later I'd type them up (being all of 10 or 12 at the time), trying to bring order to words and dates jotted all around the pages of a notepad. We had copies of copies of handwritten family group sheets that were passed out one year, faint but legible.
That planted the seed, but I turned to other things until my late 20's when I got a copy of PAF and started plugging the old information into it. If only I had known then about source citations! Ah well. I've continued chipping away over the past 30 years.
My mother's cousin Everett Chambers, before he died, sent me many of his papers. I am privileged to hold, for now, the handwritten and typed reunion minutes dating from the first one in 1898. I hope to get them digitized and online before passing them along to whomever comes next.
Appropriately, the topic for week 1 is Start and I'm using that to cover how I got started with genealogy. It began when I was a child, with my mother's mother's Chambers family of Delaware County, Ohio. Like many families, this one had annual reunions. Unlike most, they had a president, secretary, and treasurer, and kept annual minutes of reunion attendees and births, marriages, and deaths over the preceding year.
There were always one or two people who were the de facto family genealogists. Each year they'd turn up with some new find, maybe some pictures, or a new branch, or a book. But often it was just a discussion and my mother would jot down notes, trying to keep up with the speaker. Later I'd type them up (being all of 10 or 12 at the time), trying to bring order to words and dates jotted all around the pages of a notepad. We had copies of copies of handwritten family group sheets that were passed out one year, faint but legible.
That planted the seed, but I turned to other things until my late 20's when I got a copy of PAF and started plugging the old information into it. If only I had known then about source citations! Ah well. I've continued chipping away over the past 30 years.
My mother's cousin Everett Chambers, before he died, sent me many of his papers. I am privileged to hold, for now, the handwritten and typed reunion minutes dating from the first one in 1898. I hope to get them digitized and online before passing them along to whomever comes next.
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