Dont Rob yourself of the Thrill

So many people will go to ancestry or another site and say OH look I found my entire tree already done for me. whats the fun in that?

I have had many people say that they copied info from another tree just to find out later it was wrong.  You cannot write a family history by copying someone elses.  You miss out on all the fun and the thrill of discovering new records and info on someone in your tree on your own.

I have had to use paid researchers on my Northern roots and to me when I get info from them its like Christmas morning for a six year old each time.  I love seeing the new info and taking it and going online to find the sources for myself and documenting it.  I love sharing my info with others and dont mind when they copy from me but still feel like they just dont know what they are missing

What better feeling is there in the world than traveling the same streets your ancestors did in the 1800's?   Going to the old cemeteries and clearing off the graves of your ancestors and putting out a token of your appreciation for the sacrifices they made so you could stand there honoring them?

Is there a better way to spend a rainy day than pouring over old books and microfilm in the research library?  When I lived up North Winter were my best research months with Summers and Springs being set aside to visit as many towns as I could where my ancestors came from in hopes of finding something still there that was there when my ancestors lived there to take photos of. 

The joys of finding old newspaper articles about the family and sometimes the sorrows as well. Reading of my great grandfathers son drowning in Whites pond in Danbury CT and how my great grandfather found the childs limp dead body in the  water and cuddled him to his body and ran all the way home carrying him.  Tears running down my face as I read this and realize this is the year that my family started to come apart and so many changes happened to them that to this day the family is still broken. My grandfather told of how his parents turned cold towards him and his brother after the death as if they blamed them or felt it should of been them. I would rather think they were just in a constant state of mourning and felt that by not loving the other two children so strongly that if anything happened to them it would not hurt as much. I am sure it would have but who knows how a fractured mind thinks. They had buried one baby who died in infancy already and to bury an 11 year old they just never recovered from it.

For some reason my fathers family split. Some stayed in the North and some came South and to this day some have still never met.  How sad is that.  I know growing up I never knew a single cousin. And still today I have not met many of them.  I had one family on my mothers side I might have seen about six times in my entire life and none on my fathers side. One of his brothers lived right in the next town to us and yet I never met the children of that brother.   I knew my uncle well and loved him dearly. I cant say honestly that I ever met his wife though.  And she kept her children away from us.  So we made friends with neighbor kids and would call them our cousins by another mother or father just because that is the only bond we had with other children other than our siblings.

I hope people will try to mend family problems in the future to give the children a family to call theirs.