01 March 2010

When Did You First Fall in Love with Genealogy?

For me it was a cold, December day and I had an email for a free trial membership to ancestry.com. My father was working on his autobiography but he didn't know a lot about his father, Harry Glover. I was curious as well. I signed up for the free membership to see what I could find about him. The first piece of information that I found about him was his World War I draft registration card. There has always been some confusion about Harry's given name. He was also known as Frank H. Glover. His name on his registration card was Frank Henry Glover Jr. Other information I found on his card was birth date, occupation, and nearest relative. Although I later discovered some of the information was inaccurate on this form, it will always be remembered as my first source. From this one find I was hooked and able to trace Harry's ancestry to Colonial America. (Photo of Harry Glover)

1 comment:

  1. I was bitten by the genealogy bug back when I was about 16. My grandma and I went through all of her old boxes of photos. I wanted to know who all the people were, and something told me to label them, so we wrote the names on the backs in pencil. (Which I am very grateful for today!) I asked her a lot of questions and took notes on a steno pad. I looked in Michigan phone books for the name Pykett and sent letters to a bunch of them, never hearing back. (Now I know that it is because that paternal name died out,since all of the males except my great great grandfather, had died before having children, and he had only girls.) I wrote to a known distant cousin on my grandfather's side, and she sent me a hand-written family tree going back to Ireland along with a paragraph of history. I was intrigued, but school kept me busy, and the notes got put in a file. The file came with me to Washington, and once my children were in school, I borrowed every book in the library about genealogy, and the hunt was on! Then I joined Ancestry.com. I devoured the Census records, filling in decades of history. Now I have binders full, starting with some death certificates, my first paper sources. I still have the notes I wrote from my "interviews" with Grandma, though she left a lot of gaps. However, now many of the gaps have been filled. There are still VERY old photos that are unidentified, but I have been able to add names to some of them.

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