My name is Linda and I'm an ancestor-chaser.
It started one day, maybe in junior high, when a teacher asked us to fill out a pedigree chart. I remember asking my parents for information on their ancestors, and being surprised that they knew so little about even their grandparents!
For some reason, that memory stuck. Of course, in those days, I figured if my parents didn't know it, I never would.
Flash forward to college. I got a job in the college archives, where I picked up useful details about how to (and how NOT to) preserve mementos, like the donated photo albums full of pictures glued onto highly acidic black construction paper.
(Since my mother was an alumna, I also asked the archivist if I could look up Mom's transcript and check out her grades. :-) Unfortunately -- or perhaps fortunately for my mother! -- the dean in those days had tossed all the transcripts.)
The other relevant highlight of my college years was my weekend visits to my grandmother's apartment, an easy streetcar ride from campus. She, at my urging, pulled out the photo albums of my mother and aunt's childhoods, and some good instinct caused me to ask her to identify the people in the pictures, left to right, as I wrote down everything she said. She also told me stories about my grandfather, a longtime AP reporter, and showed me poems he had written.
I do wish I had listened more carefully to some of the childhood memories she talked about with her sister (who lived in the same building), but I suspect most of us have similar regrets.
Several years passed, during which I graduated from college, got married, and moved from Massachusetts where my family was, to Pennsylvania where my husband's new job was.
Being away from the family and the memories must have made me realize how much I still didn't know. One day, over 20 years ago, I sat down and wrote my grandmother a "tell me everything you know" letter.
She wrote back. The letter contained a lot of names and dates, especially about my grandfather's family, and I still refer back to it in my research. And subsequent letters had some great anecdotes about her earlier years, including seeing Halley's Comet in 1910.
A few years later, I had a baby, and something about that kicked my genealogy fascination into high gear. Luckily, my husband understood the family-history passion, so I could go to the National Archives, or New England Historic Genealogical Society or the local LDS Family History Center, and research while he pushed our son around in a stroller. Every couple of hours, we'd meet so I could nurse the baby. (The payoff for hubby was that I always promised I'd look up one or two of his ancestors.)
One afternoon at NEHGS, hubby was entertaining our son and waiting for me in the cafeteria, when he got to talking with a sweet older DAR lady who asked if I had any Revolutionary ancestors. At the time I didn't think I did, but as soon as I found one, I remembered hubby's story about this, looked up the local DAR chapter, and put together application papers. With eight generations from Massachusetts, I gathered a straight line of birth, marriage and death certificates and thought, "Hey, this is easy!"
As anyone who has been doing this for a while knows, I never had it that easy again! But I was still hooked, and still am hooked.
How did YOU come to start chasing ancestors?
