caring for the garden

OK, my 6 month subscription (plus a 30 day free trial) to Ancestry.com has ended. For many, this would have been more than enough time to find, enter, catalogue and do anything else you wanted with all the names of your reletives from the past. Richard has less than 30 family names available using both this program and information we already had from his mom. But when I got into the search engine for my family, it just went on, and on, and on. I have accumulated over 15,000 names to date. Most from the first 16 generations. But I did vear off a few times, actually following a couple family lines as far back as BC. How can that be? Well, contrary to general thought, there are records out there. They consist of land transfers, wills, church records (births, christenings, marrages, deaths), etc., as well as historical records. This geneology program brings them all together in a powerful search engine.

It was fun to play around with this program. For the free trial period, I plugged in what I already knew and was able to sort of fill in some blanks. Then I started to do some real research, pulling up political, religious, and geographical info surrounding some of the periods of history and circumstances of these folks. There are some amazing personal stories available too. What's more, I discovered that my family, both sides of my family, were directly connected to an incredible number of historical events. For instance, between my mom and dad, there were passengers on the Mayflower numbering in the teens. Richard teases me about this and several other findings.

The past few weeks I have been systematically trying to complete the work on those first 16 generations. Of course not every line goes out that far, but certainly many do. When you consider that each tree has the potential for 30 new names (4 generations per tree) and that each of the 16 names in that 4th generation then has the potention for a whole new tree, well you get the picture. Bottom line is that I completed all 16 generations for my moms family and about half for my dad's. They are all catalogued by family (mom or dad), generation, branch, and number. Now to file them in order, ID info that ties to them, etc. By the way, I have run into many duplications, where more than one branch follows the same line. If I pick up on this, I generally make note of the fact and follow it from that point only once. This saves a whole lot of duplicity. An example of this is that several lines run through Charlemagne. So if I get to him (again), I just add *THIS LINE NOTED ELSEWEHRE and stop. I will fill in info later as to just where to look for continuation of that particular line.

There is enough family info here already to fill a library. But in a few months I will go at it again. I still have a lot of family to pull up and plug into their rightful slot. But for now I need a break. Next project, paint the living room.