Genealogy

My dad has gotten into this kick of wanting to learn about our family's ancestors. Boy is that a job. Being his only kid, I'm always asked to help. I enjoy it, it has the potential to be fun & interesting,... & sometimes it is. But most of the time its just plain hard. Seriously. Didn't these people keep photo albums or something... where's that family Bible that every family seems to have... except ours. So we dig and dig. Sometimes we find a tiny sliver of hope, sometimes we feel like we found the whole pie, but most of the time we just have to continue digging.

It's funny how times change. I have known almost all of my aunts & uncles... even my great ones, but my dad didn't even know that his grand-parents had brothers and sisters... he was the 2nd youngest of his bunch, and his mom died early in his life, so that may have something to do with his lack of knowledge... but here we are trying to learn all we can before I get back into the grind of university, because to be honest I'm going to be doing so much research for my final undergraduate paper that my family history is going to have to sit on the back burner for a while.

I'm literally sitting here in the Genealogy Room at the Waycross-Ware Public Library. We've been working almost nonstop for 2 days now, & we have half of a day tomorrow before we travel home. I don't know if I've ever seen my dad so excited and enthralled in something before. It's nice to see him invested in something so heavily... he must think about this family tree everyday.

So as we continue on our journey to discover our ancestors... the Pioneers of Wiregrass, GA, I'd like to ask anyone who has done this sort of research before if they have any advice.

All of that being said. It makes me realize why I do this. Scrapbooking that is. I don't want my grandkids and their grandkids to have to guess about who I was. I mean seriously. & after looking at countless pages of newspaper on microfilm, I'm going to start documenting the small stuff... you know like what gas prices were like & why, how much a bottle of coca-cola costs, how much an average trip to the grocery store costs & what the store looked like. To me these are the things I wish I could learn about my ancestors.... but for them their everyday might have been like what their seasonal crop looked like, how much money their agriculture was worth, what their house looked like, heck, even what they looked like, town gossip [who doesn't want to know that ;)], where their friends lived and what transportation they used.

For me this solidifies doing Project Life again, among other things...
I've also considered using my digital skills to create a quasi-family tree book, to keep all of the stories we can find, facts about the people & where they lived, & everything else I can find. Wouldn't that be nice to have as a shutterfly book or something.

So I better get off of here NOW before my dad starts to get anxious about me helping him out. Seriously, if you have any advice I'd really appreciate it or projects like this, I would love to see them! & maybe it will inspire me, then I can share mine. Yay!

okay, bye now.