My genealogy efforts are dedicated to the ancestors of my past and to the relatives of the present, and to all of our future descendants.
I started my genealogy endeavors in the early 1980's, thinking I would maybe find Ancestors back to 3-5 generations. I wrote a lot of letters and made many phone calls, (I should have bought stock in Ma Bell). This was very slow, and getting pretty discouraging to say the least. I knew if I was to make my goal of 3-5 generations I had to find a better way!
With the interests in computers, genealogy, and the Internet being shown by a vast amount of people, along with the help of many friends on the Internet I have accumulated family and ancestors back to 17 generations. This was not done by me alone, I have had a lot of help breaking down brick walls. One friend found a data base with about 1400 names of my family, inculding myself being listed, another friend found cemeteries where some of my ancestors are buried, along with military records of the Civil War. This friend claims it was an accidental find, the book just jumped out at him, but I have my doubts, I have been looking for information like this for over 10 years, with no success just brick walls! After a while a person begins to ask if these were really people that lived, or are they just a figment of someones imagination, and you are the recipient of someone's lucid joke or prank.
I have now decided that just adding the names isn't enough, the number of people thatI have in my data base isn't important anymore I want more than just what appear's as faceless names in a data base even though they are my ancestors. I was feeling the
need to know these people more, I wanted stories, photographs, their histories. I kept thinking who are these people, what kind of life did they live, what were their
accomplishments, we all face defeat at times, what was theirs?
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