Genealogy Blog Launch

I have decided to launch a genealogy blog site. Blogging is a great way to share information with others, whether it be personal stories or even educational information that others can learn from. If you are lucky, you can gain followers that will also share information and help increase awareness, education, and interest.

Inspiration: My inspiration for genealogy comes from my mom - Diana. She has researched family history as far back as I can remember. She has spent countless hours driving around the country, visiting old homesteads, driving through fields to get to remote cemeteries, photographing gravestones, visiting libraries, and so on. For many years, she would talk about the family history but none of her children took much interest, including me. Personally, it wasn't a lack of interest per se, but I was still going to school working on my PhD and simply didn't have time to contribute or take interest.  As soon as I finished my doctorate, I started digging around, doing DNA tests, and I was hooked. Now, it's something my mom and I do together.  Honestly, I am sure she gets tired of my emails in her inbox, or the late night phone calls where I am asking her about an ancestor again, but one thing is for certain - when I say "hey - we are missing a link to this person"...  inevitably, my mother digs through her books and whips something out! She is like a miracle worker when it comes to finding documentation we need for our ancestry tree or lineage documentation for DAR documents.

Importance of relatives: My mom has a cousin, Henry Timman. He is a historian writer for the Norwalk Reflector in Huron County Ohio. Many of our ancestors were early settlers (first families) of Huron County Ohio. Henry has been able to provide a lot of documentation for mom and I when we needed something for our lineage paperwork. He has some pretty neat stories too. With his involvement in the historical society of Huron County (an authority on Firelands History), he is also a resource for us when we are trying to find information on our ancestors... his ancestors too!

Advice: Whether you have a relative working as a historian or not, it is so important when visiting relatives to record conversations, take notes while talking to them, go through old photos and document people, dates and places on the back of the photos, etc.   Trust me, if you wait until people have passed away - it's too late and you have lost that valuable information.