Being a genealogist and the keeper of the family keys..........I absolutely love her poem too. She nailed it!

They do come popping out of closets and it's amazing how time seems to wash their lives and deeds like a good shower. Instead of being disappointed that a good many of my ancestors weren't anybody history would have noticed, it was almost reaffirming to see that they were just good, hardworking and decent people dealing with life the best way they could under difficult circumstances.

Been at it a dozen years now, and every tidbit of information does flesh out the bones and make them real and remembered. I like to think that they are somewhere smiling knowing that they are.

i'll never tell Steve S.

That is great, Lilo!
She lets them breathe their own air, so to speak!
My cousin Sean, has been after our family skeletons for years----a bunch of Yankees--no tellin' WHAT they were up to half the time!
Sometimes I'll go on Mapquest, pull up a satellite map of upstate NY--
(-'REAL' upstate---good Grief!!!!----I even heard someone on TV refer to BINGHAMTON as 'upstate'!!!!!!)
and follow the roads my Grandma and I used to drive along in her little Studebaker. We'd either leave the log house on Rugar St. in Plattsburgh, or the summer house in Keene, and drive all over the Adirondaks taping old, old stories and even older folksongs, as part of her job as historian for Clinton Co., NY.
An hour or two later, I'm back at the computer, but in the meantime, I've smelled the beautiful red leather interior of her '57 Skyhawk, ate one of her most wonderful egg salad sandwiches on the shores of Lake Champlain, dosed as she drove smack-dab down the middle of the road, moving over only if someone bigger than she were coming the other way---a perfect day for any child!
Sheesh, Lilo----look what you went and made me do!!---You can come next time, if you want! :o)

---make that, "---EATEN one of her egg salad sandwiches" instead of "ate."
"DOZED as she drove" instead of "dosed."

Go ahead; laugh, maybe I'll pay more attention NEXT time!!
Snort!
Man; that really gripes me when I do that stuff! I can just see me in the Old Folks Home, banging my head against a wall because someone may have said, "Honey, ain't you got a tissue--you got drool runnin' down yo' chin, Baby!"

KJ - you crack me up!
The idea of compiling family history came to be because of Facebook! How is that possible? Cristina found the "Lost Tribe", my sister Carola's offspring, on Facebook, we all connected and we discovered our nieces and nephews and their offspring and started talking.
Carola is in a Nursing home, having had a couple of strokes, doesn't communicate. She was estranged from her children for a long time. It is a sad, long story of a turbulent life.
Anyway, the "tribe" didn't know much about any part of their ancestors, so this is a good thing.
I am delighted to have a lot of nieces and nephews and grand
nieces, all of different backgrounds and interests.
They are all on the other coast, but there are plans of some of us getting together.

Geneology can be a wonderful, never completed, hobby. It just goes on and on as you find different branches and more "cousins"

My husband had a cousin that did extensive research on one of their forefathers. It seems that she was able to tie the family back directly to the man that invented the Spinning Jenny. She even published a small book about the family. My husband did a little more research and found that they were actually kin to a man that had the same name and lived about the same time as the inventor. He decided he didn't want to correct her. She had just taken one small mis-step and didn't research more.

My father's family took some pride in believing that the family had not owned slaves even though they had lived in a big cotton plantation area. During my research, I came across some slave schedules for the area. OOPS! our great grandfather had two....a 13 year old personal servant and a 13 year old girl for his wife as kitchen help. He had a total of two wives, one died in childbirth, leaving eight or nine children for the second wife (who had about 10 more) to take care of. (did she really need a slave to help?)

I told a cousin about what I had found. She didn't want to believe it. It was something that she had heard all her life and felt it set her family apart from the rest of the people in her little home town.

My aunt started working on the history and her daughter continued. We have CDs of written records and pictures that have been shared around the family.

Turns out at least one on my dads side was a tailor in Germany. I have a picture of My Grand father's Tailor shop in Iowa from the '30s or '40s.

{{gwi:135593}}

That is a totally cool picture, and I can remember stores like that were still around in town when I was a teenager. That is Americana, pure and simple. I love the juxtaposition of the bow ties and the bibs.