My interest in genealogy began at quite a young age. I was always the child asking questions to the elders around me, seeking stories and new experiences through them. As my knowledge of history grew, so too did my questions. When I was in elementary school, I recall asking my Grandma Leona what religion she was. She stated that she was born Methodist. I was 8, so no further questions were necessary. She must be Methodist. When I was in high school, I again asked my grandma about her religious beliefs. She told me that she did not particularly adhere to a specific belief system but that she knew there were Methodist Pastors who came from either Scotland or Ireland in our family. I took what she said at face value as my family always claimed we were Native American and Scots-Irish.
That is me and my two sisters with my Grandma Leona. I am the one with the DARE t-shirt.
In college, I was on sites like Geocities trying to track down genealogical information. The Rootsweb forums were another site I would peruse, getting excited to see a surname and/or specific post about an ancestor. My grandparents gave me all the information they could remember and/or were willing to share. Now, 20 years later, I have seen the explosion of sites like Family Search, Jewish Gen, and Ancestry.com. Repositories have created usable catalogues whereby one can get an idea of what they may find when they go to that location. Even with this, the thrill of knowing that much of the data has yet to be digitized and even digitized data has not been wholly indexed keeps the urge to head out by car or plane or both to find information captivating.
There were barriers of course. When I was younger, my focus was on school and then on employment. While I still loved genealogy, the financial burden of procuring records & gas money was strenuous. Further, since understanding trauma and generational abuse was one of my interests, the conversations could be hard as so many hurts ran through both lines of my family tree. As time moved forward, my family became more forthcoming. Granted, it could have also been because I was now older.
As I grew and began to better understand history, the complexity therein, and took an interest specifically in Immigration History, I began to to question some of the stories I had heard and took as truth in my younger years. Now, I knew they were not lying and fully believed what they told us to be true, but I had a need to discover my own ancestral ties to assist in better understanding myself and my loved ones.
I currently live in Connecticut, so I have easy access to records in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and New York. My Maternal side of the family hails from mainly from Scotland and Ireland. They immigrated mostly to Appalachia, many being farmers and coal miners. My paternal side was of the same stock. The arrived and set up show in New England, Canada and then moved further west to Michigan.
My husband and both sides of his family are Ashkenazic Jews who mostly arrived in America in the late 1800s early 1900s. His maternal roots are mostly from Germany while his paternal roots are from the Minsk area.
I enjoy the search for information and gratification of piecing something firmly together using genealogical proof principles. I enjoy writing the story with a historical context. I simply enjoy genealogy.
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