Lately I've been obsessed with my family history. It's a curiosity to me that I'm so obsessed. I have no real idea why I'm doing so much work on it but it seems to be VERY fun!

I saw an ad one day on yahoo's homepage saying that ancestry.com had added military records and now gave access to beaucoup bits of info about people in the family trees. So I took a look at the website--never having done one thing on genealogy or family history before. They give two weeks free membership, so I constructed what little I knew of my family tree into it. My family has long been scattered and not the type to really keep in touch with one another. My dad died when I was 12. His older brother had died before I was born, and his sister was in another state. I only met her once. My mother has two brothers who lived in other states and they were not much in contact. I am very close to my own brother and sisters, so I thought it was kind of sad that my mother's family was not close. We are all scattered from one end of this country, too, but we have the internet and are in touch almost daily!

Anyway, once I got a rudimentary tree built on what little I knew, all of a sudden all these public records presented themselves through the website, along with the trees other people had constructed that possibly related to my own! It's a wonderful thing! I've found that with very little work, my family tree goes WAY back to the 1600s, to England, Canada, and France! Of course there are still some mysteries where it does not go beyond a grandparent and we cannot find anything more at all! For example, my mother's father, who was a Canadian is totally lost. We have no idea who his family was.

Both of my sisters have become involved. I invited them into the website through my creation of the family tree. We can post family photos, too, on ancestry.com, and I actually found a very old photo of a patriarch of a very large part of my paternal grandmother's family! I also found a terribly old and faded photo of his wife on this website. I'm thrilled! I'm posting old family photos, too, in case someone I don't know but who is related way back is looking for them! Just so you know, no information is made public on people still alive and no census records are posted after 1930 because people after that are likely still living. This is to protect identities. So I'm happy with that.

I've now met a cousin of my dad's who only lives a 1/2 hour drive away from me! I did not even know she existed before I started this project a few weeks ago! I visited her and she showed me photos of my great grandmother, who is her grandmother, that I had never seen in my life! We are in almost daily contact with email now. She's 73, so I'm glad I found her and she's very glad too. I also met a distant cousin in Connecticut who shares the same great great grandmother! He sent me an entire book of that side of family tree that he had created using all the public records and birth and death dates from his family Bible, where people used to record family data. I reconnected with a cousin of my mother's and she is 86! I could have lost these people if I had not started this project now! She gave me the telephone number of another of my mother's cousins who I knew when I was very small. That one lives in Phoenix so I need to call her soon, too, because she's now very elderly as well. I've already lost many family treasures (the people) who have passed on and I want to know and treasure the ones still living before they are gone.

I am realizing that one guy in Canada in the late 1700's and early 1800's had 12 kids who all had 10 or 12 kids themselves and probably populated 3/4 of Iowa with people with my last name! They married, had kids of different last names, and spread all over the country. I'm probably related to half the country by the looks of these trees! It's wonderful.

I'm also realizing how very short one lifetime seems to be. People I met briefly--like my dad's father--were here and gone before I grew old enough to really appreciate him! I myself have had no children, so I probably occur to my nieces and nephew as some weird old lady who shows up once every few years that they don't know or care about. I'll just be a blip on their consciousness once I'm gone, too. I had an aunt who was like that when I was a kid. Now I realize from looking at all the things she did for us as a family and how she always showed up from out of state for special occasions how much she cared for us. But I basically just ignored her because I was young and unconscious. Sigh. I'm not leaving any legacy behind as far as family. So I'm just a blip on the screen.

This whole project has been fun. It has connected me more deeply to my ancestors and to my two sisters anyway. We've had lots of fun sharing the old photos from our boxes stored away in closets which we've dug out, scanned in, and emailed to each other--me in California, Diane in Boise, and Eva in Georgia. I've learned little family secrets that none of us knew before. I've uncovered little mysteries that are still unanswered. I've seen the vastness of family connections across the planet, and I've come to view myself as a tiny dot on the continuum of time!

Oh, and I ended up purchasing a year's membership in ancestry.com. It's incredibly expensive! This is because someone has to go to the libraries or courthouses or wherever these public records are kept, transcribe them from the old handwriting into typed form, and collect them all to be shared. This takes lots of manpower. But I got in on a special deal for Memorial Day for just $80 for a year. Deals are there if you are patient. I encourage you all to look into it. The more we share publicly of our trees, the more we can know about our own ancestors. Many other genealogy programs are all connected, too, so it does not matter much which one you join.

Now I'm busily printing out all the profiles, trees, photos, stories, etc. that I have entered for each person to put in big binders in case I lose everything online somehow.