Why Genealogy?
It started with my mother, who wanted to understand photos that she was given by her aunt. They were not identified. One was the picture on the home page. It was of a lady taken in the 1880s, who looked very like her father. Her father's mother had died when he was 3, and there was very little information about her. But the desire to find out more was the starting the point...........................................
So her interest infected me, and I was hooked. Fortunately I was able to make use of her work on her family, and the work she did with my father on his. I used "Kith and Kin" to log both these details and the information I gathered from my parents in law.
To begin with, I just collected dates, and some other memories - as much as possible, but with little checking of sources. Kith and Kin gave way to Family Tree Maker, which I still use. Ancestry, MyHeritage, GENI, Familysearch and other sites offered lots of other family trees, which were, and still are valuable ways of finding other elements of people's stories. But they were, and are, full of mistakes, spread by the ease of pasting information, good or bad into new trees. I sometimes message people who have what looks like useful insights, and ask for the evidence for their trees. Often, unfortunately there seems to be little real data and instead much guesswork, or worse picking of any record that might be right, but with little real certainty.
But recently, I find myself swinging back again. Because where the factual evidence is hard to find, I think it right to use my imagination. So, where it is a reasonable possibility, I put it in, with that caveat, to enable a supposition of what might be, and provide that colour that is otherwise missing, even though I cannot prove it.
So this is it...... The story of how we came to be. Not just in terms of our genetics, but our connections with a huge number of individual and community stories. Our connections to the economic, political and cultural themes of the last few hundred years and our ancestral threads that have run through them. Ultimately genealogy is all about aligning oneself with humanity, and so hopefully I can do something towards filling in that understanding and connection.
Recently my son gave me a wooden deskpiece... It says
Every family
has a story.
Welcome to ours.
Enjoy.