Genealogy

One of my hobbies, which I started a few years ago in late 2001, is doing genealogical research. I find this stuff fascinating for a number of reasons. Here they are:

1. My family actually didn't really talk about their background/ancestors that much when I was growing up. This is now an "adult" reason to ask questions, and to learn more about where we/I came from. I always knew that my grandparents had siblings, and even met some of them when we were kids, but other than one Great-Aunt, we really didn't see them very often, or at all on my mom's side.

2. I've always been fascinated by names, old photos, and history in general. This hobby allows me to play into all three of those areas.

3. Being into Genealogy is a fun way to play detective. For instance, when I started this, I collected some of my great-grandmother's photos that my Dad had. There was one old photo, on cardboard, that I had never seen. I asked him who it was, and he told me that it was his grandmother's mother. Wow! I had never seen her photo. On the bottom of the photo was the word "Paisley." After doing this research for a bit, I learned that my great-grandmother's family was from Scotland, specifically the town of Paisley. Ergo, the photo was taken there. Because of that, I was able to figure out that the photo was taken between 1880-1885. Pretty cool!

4. I have been able to contact distant relatives, and learn about their own personal stories of the family. Granted, I wish I could have more success with this, or that more people had old photos or family material to share, but I can't have everything....

I think I may use this blog to post some old photos periodically. I may also look around for a website to host my genealogy stuff, so that perhaps some lone soul doing a Google search for their family can stumble upon my site. We'll see how that goes...

And just so you know, here's the family names associated with my direct ancestors: Lord, Sanecki, Moskwa, Partridge, Gatz (Gac in Polish), Kawa, Furgas, Flaga, Ruszala, Zlotek, Nixon, Riepe, Coulson, Fagan (or Fegan), Shields, Schulze, Hafner, Marcker, Lang, Alderdice, McHenry, Houston, Lindsay, Gibb, Fleming, Laird, Taylor, and some others that I can't remember off the top of my head...

My background on my mom's side is Polish, and on my dad's side is Irish, Scots, German, and English.

More soon!

Mike