From Randy (a cousin discovery!!) over at Genea-Musings:
it's Saturday Night -
time for more Genealogy Fun!!!
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:
(1) Daniel Loftus and several other genealogists on Twitter (see My Genealogy Story?) challenged genealogists to share what first sparked their interest in family history. What was yours?
(2) Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, in a post on Facebook, or on Twitter using the #MyGenealogyStory hashtag.
Here's mine:
As I mentioned in my 2011 post, Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Thanksgiving Edition, my maternal grandfather, Pop Pop, is the one who sparked my interest in genealogy. He left behind a steno pad full of names and dates, and I took those and added and added to them until I now have 19,360 people in my database! I've come a long way in the last 10 years!
Genealogy was a hobby I would work on feverishly for awhile and then set aside for a long while. Then I would come back to it. This went on for years until about 15 years ago or so, I really began to become immersed in it. I went to my first conference, visited my local Family History Center location, became friends with genealogists from around the world through social media, and started a blog.
I also combined vacation trips with genealogy, for instance, visiting California with my mother for her high school reunion, but also visiting cemeteries, old home locations, etc. Then in 2011, Mom and I traveled up through Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, visiting Civil War battle sites and researching my great-grandfather Tapley's path through the war.
Now in the last 10 years, since I moved to North Carolina, I have moved away from the "social" aspect of the hobby but am totally immersed in working on genealogy in my home almost every single day. I am constantly checking Ancestry hints, obituaries, Find a Grave or any other genealogical site for information to add to my family tree. I visit Georgia several times a year, and we almost always visit with a cousin or go to a cemetery, or both!
My late cousin, Wesley, Jr., was also instrumental in keeping those genealogy sparks of flame burning! He had an excellent memory and boy, could he tell you some stories! He would always talk family history with me and share whatever he knew. It was like I had the names and dates aspect from Pop Pop, but I also got the names turning into real, live people through the stories Wesley Jr shared with me.
Today, I have a family history database, an online family tree, a hard drive just for genealogy, lots of papers and photos, and a blog. And I still want to grow it even more!
This is a passion, a calling, and an obsession. I would rather do this than anything else. Many times, I do.
Thank you, Pop Pop for giving me the spark to get me started. Thank you, Wesley, Jr., for fanning those flames and keeping me going.
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| Pop Pop and me |
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| Wesley Jr |
What a great story. You're right, genealogy is a hobby that can be set aside and then returned to a month, a year or many years later. I hit a point in the 1990s (started in 1979)when I had less free time. Now that I'm retired, like you, it's an obsession.
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