The new 52 Ancestors, 52 Weeks challenge for 2018 will have a keyword each week to help jump start people's ideas for their blog posts. This week's word is start. The keywords are not about anything specific. It's just to get participants of the challenge thinking & then doing. The originator of the challenge, Amy Johnson Crow, stated on her blog that it could be about starting goals or how you got started in family history, etc. The keyword will mean something different to everyone depending upon how they interpret it, so here is my take on this week's word.
I first began actively researching my family history twenty-two years ago when my current husband & I got married; before that, I had only played around with it some during my first & second marriages. But even before that, I guess you could say I got my interest in my family history from my mother & her family. My mother is the second youngest of eight children (she even makes that distinction sound like something a Borg would be named by incorporating it into her e-mail address). One of her older sisters, Ruth, joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints when my mother was a teenager. Mom lived with her sister Ruth during her final year of high school in Dallas & took the missionary lessons which led to her being baptized in the summer of 1963. To me, this seemed like the first in a series of acts of non-conformity on my mother's part as she joined the church & then three years later, she married my father (without parental approval) in that church. Mom & Dad would take us to the library, but were always frustrated by the lack of available records at that time. One of the things Mom used to love to do when she was more physically able was to cemetery hop. She would take about five pictures of the same headstone. I used to think that was crazy, but with the advent of the cell phone, I find myself often doing the same thing (regardless of the subject).
My mother's family has always been close which is somewhat of a contradiction to how my father was raised as an only child by his mother (Dad's extended family was also a big one on both sides, but they didn't seem to be as close as my mother's family was). As a member of the Church, Aunt Ruth became interested in genealogy & in 1967, she & her second husband Ray & their children were sealed as a family for time & all eternity in the Salt Lake Temple (which is a big deal if you're a member of the Church). Back then, genealogy wasn't nearly as easy as it is in the age of the internet & I'm sure that Aunt Ruth spent hours & hours in libraries, courthouses, etc., & sending out records requests & letters to people with a possible family connection to us. One of my other aunts by marriage who lived in Washington State was also in to genealogy. Aunt Ruth compiled & assembled giant tomes of research for each sibling which I'm sure Aunt Nancy from Washington helped contribute to. Aunt Ruth has continued to research & refine these treasures for each of her children & on down. She has been the one who plans the annual family reunion each July & all the family has seemed to gravitate towards her during such events.
I should mention that my mother's oldest sister Dean also was a great one when it came to family history. Aunt Dean was the oldest of the eight; the first one married of all the siblings & the one with the most children with a grand total of eight kids of her own. She was always good about sending school pictures & such to my mother when we were all young. When her kids married, she took an interest in their mates & the grandchildren that followed. I believe a lot of the photos we received of the younger cousins (her grandchildren) came from her. She usually always wrote a cute little quote on the backs of her envelopes: smile before opening, open before reading, read before answering, answer before long! She kept a lot of the correspondence she received in a scrapbook & many family photos on her walls at home. She & her husband, Uncle WJ, would often come down to visit my maternal grandparents all the way from Oklahoma City. Aunt Dean & Uncle WJ had a long & happy marriage of fifty years before passing away in 1996 & 1997.
Looking back, it seems like it has fallen mostly to the women (we do have a few menfolk interested in family history) of the family to be the family historians. When I was a little girl, my mother would tell us kids about our heritage. (My father's paternal side of the family hails from Zacatecas, Mexico while his mother's family is from SC, AL & Central Texas. Mom's father's paternal family originally emigrated to the United States from Switzerland in 1750 & fought in the American Revolution. Mom's father's mother came from the South before moving west to Texas. Mom's mother's maternal & paternal side came from the same area of Texas, but before each came west, they followed the same migration patterns that Mom's father's family had taken). Mom impressed upon us that our heritage was something to be proud of because it was the one thing that could never be taken from us. The ones who came before laid the ground work for all of those of us who have come afterwards. I often wonder what they would make of life today with its modern day conveniences. While I've seen life as it was in the movies & read scores of books, etc., I don't know that I could have lived in their time. And they probably wouldn't know what to make of things in mine. I don't know how far I will get this year with the 52 Ancestors, 52 Weeks challenge, but I hope you enjoy reading for as long as I can keep the posts coming.
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