I consider myself lucky in that part of my family tree has been charted for a long time. My father's family has been following the genealogy of one specific couple and their offspring, including having annual family reunions. The family has published genealogy documents showing all known descendants and their pertinent information (birth, death, marriage) of which I am part of the 6th generation.
During college, a psychology assignment was to do a family tree and I had rather lopsided tree, lots of people on one grandparent branch, but very little on the other 3 lines. My tree had been pruned severely. That project left a lot of questions in my mind about the other lines but I didn't do much about it back then.
Fast forward 25 +/- years and an offer from an online genealogy search program that I decided to take. With Ancestry.com I was able to get lots of matching details on my paternal grandfather's line to those of the family publication. My paternal grandmother's line was a lot of question marks as Nana's mother died while Nana was very young. On Ancestry.com I was able to locate census records for Nana's mother.
Armed with a name and location, I wrote to local town halls trying to learn more about this woman, as well as locate a cemetery in the community. Unfortunately the town office didn't have any new information for me. They did, however, give me a sense of where to find the cemetery and one day I decided to go for a drive.
I did not have much luck on that day, the town hall was closed and I didn't find the cemetery suggested to me. I did pass one other cemetery and for some reason, decided it might have some information and I stopped.
My decision to stop payed off as it WAS the cemetery I was searching for. I started to walk about reading names on stones. And there she was. My Nana's mother, and around her stone were those of her parents, and their parents and even their parents. I had found the mother lode (forgive the pun). I went searching for 1 specific person and ended up discovering 4 generations.
That day I was infected by the genealogy search bug and have found several missing links but still have lots of pieces to my puzzle to find.
Recently, while going through old photographs at my parent's home I came across an image of my Nana with her parents and younger brothers, George and the twins Clyde and Claude.
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