it is an addiction that will suck you in. It's sort of like a lottery addiction; the inconsistent payback
keeps you hooked. That's how I feel when I search for records for someone. For a long time,
nothing, then BINGO! I'll hit the jackpot. This past week I found my second story of murder / attempted
murder in the family line. This past month, through my research on Ancestry.com, I connected
my husband and is siblings with a cousin no one had seen in 50 years. We'll be having a meet up on Long Island this summer. Then I 'met' a cousin through one family line of mine, and we shared a great deal of information and stories. Two weeks later, I 'met' a third cousin (literally, a third cousin) who can fill in the mystery of my grandpa's oldest brother's family. Some of the cousins I have met have become good friends, albeit we are too far away to communicate except by email and phone.
It's not just stringing names together, it is piecing together the family stories from the various bits of data collected here and there, and then putting them into the time frame and place of their existence, such as you
did with 1848. Absolutely addicting.
My own family research began with a photo we inherited of a man in tights, circa late 1800s. I spent two years trying to figure out who he was, and finally did...through a circus collector on Australia that I 'met' on the internet. Turns out this was my great grand uncle, who was a world famous trapeze artist. He travelled around the world with Ziegfeld, who later developed his Follies, and with heavy weight lifting champion Sandow, who was ultimately immortalized as the figure for the heavy weight championship trophy.
I could go on and on. The stories are amazing. The one thing that always gets me is the census in the early 1900s that has women report how many children they gave birth too, and how many were still alive. Heartbreaking.
= new reply since forum marked as read
