In My Mom Era

In honor of National Ancestors Appreciation Day

I’m a collector. Of books, crazy road trip ideas, dreams, and dead ancestors. Lol, it is what it is!

On any given day, thanks to the incredible technology we have today, I might scroll through hundreds of pages of census data ranging from the 1840s through the 1950s, trying to track down where my mother’s great-uncle’s third wife’s son with her second husband lived!

And WHY am I looking for this particular person?

I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA.

But somewhere along the way, I found a name, clicked on a record, discovered another marriage, and suddenly I was six generations deep into a family that may or may not even be related to me by blood.

And now I NEED to know what happened to them. Meanwhile, the original ancestor I was researching? COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN. 🤣

Welcome to genealogy. 😂

The thing is, every single one of those 18,000+ people had a life. They had families, jobs, dreams, heartbreaks, adventures, and probably a few scandals that nobody wanted written down.

Some left behind photographs, letters, and newspaper articles. Others left nothing more than a name on a census record or a date carved into a gravestone.

And every once in a while, you find something that makes you stop scrolling.

And speaking of unexpected discoveries, I recently wrote about my great-granduncle, a Farmington country musician and radio personality. Read Johnny Rion, Country Music, and the Family Name I Passed Down to My Son to see where one of those genealogy rabbit holes led me! ❤️

A familiar name. An unexpected address. A family that suddenly disappears from the records. An ancestor who crossed an ocean without knowing what awaited them on the other side.

That’s when the rabbit hole REALLY begins.

And I just can’t let things go. I started working on my family tree in 2019/2020 – right as the world went wonky. Honestly, I wish I had started sooner – even by just a few years- because then I could’ve asked my grandma Beck a LOT of questions.

That’s the downside of geneology – you only have so much time to ask the people you love to give you the information you need to reconstruction your families past. It’s heartbreaking.

Instead, I’ll continue what I’m doing now. Digging. At this point, I don’t even need to be related to someone. If they married into the family in 1842, apparently their entire extended family is now my business. 😅

How far back have you traced your family tree, and what’s the most surprising thing you’ve discovered?

Kelly