52 ancestors in 52 weeks. This is a challenge that I just became aware of this past week. You are given a very vague prompt upon which you can write a story from your genealogy that can be about a particular ancestor or not. The idea as I understand it is to write something about our ancestors which pulls them from the binders and the password protected web family trees that we have and rarely share. I like it. Of course it was started at the beginning of the year and I will need to catch up but here we go with the first prompt.
Start
Thirteen years ago while I was on a break from my paid employment I enrolled in a Beginner's Level Genealogy class through the local library. Perhaps that was the beginning of all this madness that some call passion. I was hooked.At the end of the first class, the instructor said to us; “Start at the beginning, start at home and start with what you know.” I found this rather odd because I came to find what I did not know. However I went home and started a simple family tree. It was appalling how little I knew. I knew my siblings and their spouses names, I knew birth dates for some of the spouses and names of my nieces and nephews. Further I discovered that I had no documentation for anyone in the family in my possession.
We all have that one person in the family who is the keeper of important papers. At this time both my mom and dad were already gone. In my case it was my younger sister who had all the valuable documents. Also my oldest sibling was the wealth of the oral knowledge of the family. Over the years their contributions have been invaluable to me. Thus my first simple tree started with myself, my spouse and children and my siblings and their spouses and children. I fleshed out their vital statistics and found myself quite proud of this little achievement. It was more work than I anticipated however I was proud of this family tree. I learned about my immediate family and really looked forward to taking it to the next level – grandparents.
Wendy
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