Who Am I...and Where Did I Come From???

Yesterday was spent with my Mom and Dad.  We were working on our Genealogy.  I know you thought this was going to be "The Sex Talk".  Too late for that one.

In 2006 Mom bought the discs for Family Tree Maker.  Ancestry.com is the culprit.  We bought her a laptop and started filling out what we knew off the tops of our heads.  Dad provided some comedy when we asked him his grandmother's name.  "Grandma" was the reply.  No we wanted her birth name, which we were pretty sure was not Grandma.  After some digging and not much help from Dad we found her given name.

My Great-grandma, Adaline

We quickly found that we had hit a brick wall.  We had collectively emptied our brains of any family that we knew.  Mom thought that she had some information that someone had given her sometime in the past.  Who knew if it was even us.  We didn't even know how to check at that time.  So the paper went back into a folder in a cabinet and set there.

I will admit that living on a sailboat in Guatemala did not lend itself to helping mom much with her search.  Life happened and we all just let things sit.  Sure I thought about it and wondered if we would start up again, but then my plate was pretty full so nothing happened.

Well things have changed.  Mom got the new 2011 edition on Family Tree Maker with all the additions and bells and whistles.  Let the adventure begin.

We commandeered the kitchen table, set up her laptop, and printer.  Folders came out and we set down for some serious looking.  It was hard to start up after our vacation, but we persevered.  We watched tutorials.  Some of them several times.  We set aside time to watch the Webinar that evening hosted by Ancestry.com.  Don't we sound like we know what we are doing?

Well THANK YOU for the updates to the program.  We found a mother load!  People share their trees now and you can get hints.  We need hints badly.  We are such neophytes at this.  We aren't even sure how to get organized.  We print out everything.

That leaf means a hint

  We had dad making folders, bringing us paper, buying an external hard drive.  At one point we talked about a whiteboard and posting the working tree on the wall.

We laughed, we cried, we hooted and hollered.  We began to say names like a mantra...Ethelbert, son of William and Mary.  Ethelbert married Mary Jane and their children are.....

That paper that has been in a cabinet for years...turns out we are related.  It has opened a lot of doors for us.  We have barely scratched the surface.  We have, however, started.