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| Photo courtesy of Ancestry.com |
I have been off-and-on shaking my family tree over the past few years. Some of that is because of newly discovered connections found out at wakes or funerals.
Part of it is due to binge watching Finding Your Roots on PBS. The stuff they find out is fascinating! Granted, some of it is harsh and uncomfortable, but still fascinating.
Now, I don't have that kind of time, resources, or patience that the staff on that show does, but there are some tools out there for wanna-be genealogists such as myself.
My first foray into the whole build-a-family-tree adventure was several years ago on the Family Echo website. This appealed to me mostly because it was free. I had fun with it and found out some stuff I hadn't known.
Not only that, but it gave me a reason--as if I truly need one--to reach out to my aunts and cousins for vital statistics. This, in turn, led to a quarterly lunch date with my two remaining aunts. How cool is that?!
Anyway, I have advanced now to using the My Heritage website. There is a subscription associated with this, but the data available is overwhelming! One really cool thing with this website is when you click on a person in the family tree, it tells you if it's your third cousin once removed or your mother-in-law's half-sister's ex-husband. Talk about drilling down to the nitty gritty!
The other very, very cool thing about this website is that you can have it print out a family book. I remember that someone in my dad's family did this just after Captain and I got married, and it was awesome. The fact that I could now do this for my kids and grandkids thrills me to death. Well, hopefully not to death; I don't want to end up on the family tree that way just yet.
I didn't want to find relatives by submitting and publicizing my DNA. First, as an adoptee, I think that would be a can of worms best left unopened. Second, I don't know those people. The family I know is the one that I grew up with.
So I went with the old fashioned paper trail method. Well, digitized paper trail. I know there are public records that are not digitized that I could access by actually going to the courthouse or public library and looking at them, but that's something for retirement, I think.
The other reason I started delving into genealogy is because every year when I go to St. Michaels Cemetery to put out the flags for the veterans, there is one veteran's grave that just makes me sad. He's been gone for decades, and there is no one to visit his grave or even care that it's there. I don't know why that particular grave hits me so hard when there are hundreds there, but that one does for some reason.
I want to find out more about who he was, where he came from, what he did, who his people were. Maybe when I retire, that can be another project; researching people in our cemetery and creating a family book for them as a gift to their families.
Call me weird. Other people travel or do exciting things when they retire; me, I want to dig into historical records of people I've never met.
I've said it before: I really, really, really wish I'd paid more attention when my parents talked about their aunts and uncles and grandparents. Then maybe it wouldn't be such a monumental effort now to track information down.
Still, even when it takes some effort, it is so rewarding to add another little branch to the family tree!
