A log.. a blog.. about the perils of genealogy research

I can't even begin to count how many hours I've spent in the last 20+ years researching my family tree.

It all started with a folder full of handwritten notes given to me by my great-uncle Jimmy.  He and his wife never had children, but he loved keeping track of his family's history.  Since he was nearing the end of his life, he decided to trust me with the "folder" since I was the only one at the time who had shown any interest.

All the other great-nieces and nephews were too busy, lived far away, or had their own genealogy "thing" going.   I think all THAT was likely them wanting to hoard whatever family photos they had in their possession, much in the way that relatives came crawling out of the woodwork to raid Uncle Jimmy's house when he passed away.

Anyway, all these years later I find it rather funny that I'm the childless one, yet I'm the one doing the genealogy research.

I did, indeed start this effort in the days before Ancestry dot com, or digitized records.  My early days of research were spent in dusty library reading rooms in front of a microfilm viewer, scrolling through census records and making notes.I jumped into the deep end of the genetic genealogy "pool" back in 2010 or so when I submitted my spit to 23andme.  Not long after that, I had my dad tested there as well because his mom was an adoptee.  I'll get into that more later.
Now "all the cool kids" are doing AncestryDNA, tuning in to the reality show "Finding Lost Family", and digging around in what often is rootbound soil in a complicated family tree.

This experience, along with being a self-taught minion of the tech industry (I first learned to write HTML back in 1995), has made me a bit grumpy when it comes to online genealogical research and all the random folks I encounter on social media who think that family trees are something a computer can create as easily as clicking a few buttons and submitting your credit card number.
Some family trees are beautiful, elegant, and bring joy to the lives of all who are part of it.

Other family trees are gnarled, overgrown messes like that monstrosity growing in your neighbor's yard whose roots dig into your sewer line, or the giant gingko tree that stinks up your whole neighborhood every spring.

My family tree has proven to be more like the one that was struck by lightning a few times, has a few dead spots, but still offers a nice bit of shade in the summer, and provides a home for various tree rodents and birds.

I'm going to attempt to reflect on my family history research here, as well as general observations about situations and people I encounter on my journey to "see (more) dead people".