Genealogy has been a large part of my life for better than ten years yet I have never blogged about it. I have always assumed that you would not be interested because my genealogy is only about my family and not about yours. On the other hand, I have made several exciting discoveries lately which are (I hope) generally interesting so, with a little nudge from Candy, I am beginning to blog about this little pastime of mine. I’ll begin with a tiny bit of navel gazing so please indulge me (or just quietly skip onto the next article in your blogroll and spare me the pain of knowing that, truly, no one cares about my navel).
Like almost everyone else, my genealogy research began as a child as my mother told me stories about our family. Like almost every other child, I did not care one whit about the vast majority of the stories she told: the people where old or dead; I had not met them and would not meet them. BFD.
Somewhere around my late 30s, I got seriously interested in chasing down some of my genealogy. (Yes, my mom was pleased with me.) I spent time at the local Family History Center and the local public library crawling through spools of microfilm of census index cards. It was slow and tedious but the process grudgingly yielded up tantalizing connections to people and places that I had heard about but previously ignored. I bought a copy of Family Tree Maker and made a pretty serious attempt to organize what I learned and print it out in ways which were meaningful to other people. My mom loved it and my sons politely asked me if I would keep the printed booklets and charts for them “so they wouldn’t lose them.” It’s true: what goes around, comes around.
Disaster struck in the spring of 2001. Thieves stole my laptop and, though I had backups, through an error on my part, the genealogy files were not included in the backups. I lost almost everything. I was able to retrieve the public information from a web site where I had published my family tree. Gone were all of the scanned photos and all of the private information associated with living people (birth dates and places, marriage dates and places, etc.). Thoroughly disgusted, I gave up genealogy for about eight years.
Last June, at my mother’s funeral, Melanie and Dorr rather pointedly asked me why I had not delivered genealogical reports to them, as promised back before my laptop had been stolen. My hat will be eternally off to the two of them for giving me the incentive I needed to pick this hobby up again.
Since I now run Ubuntu Linux on my laptop, I decided to switch from the Windows-based Family Tree Maker to GRAMPS, which runs natively on Linux. This has been a wonderful decision. GRAMPS works beautifully and produces some very nice reports and, even better, a fantastic web site. Here is one screen snapshot.
The on-line genealogy research world has improved amazingly over the last few years. What used to take weeks and involved trips to the Family History Center, pawing through microfilm of index cards, ordering (and paying for) microfilm of the actual census, waiting for the census microfilm, and a second trip to the FHC to read and print the census image; can now be done on-line instantly. Ancestry.com has all of the census data and a myriad of other data indexed and searchable and viewable for a subscription fee which, though not cheap, is certainly reasonable. Add to that tools like JewishGen and GenealogyBank.com and Facebook and Google and email and I can now accomplish in days what would have taken months previously. As an impatient computer geek, I’m in heaven.
I have built my family tree out to encompass 577 individuals, over 80 of them with photographs. I have found history that I never imagined being able to find and living relatives who I never knew existed. More on that in upcoming posts.
