Catching the (genealogy) bug

 First off, don’t worry; I’m not sick. However, I did catch the genealogy bug.

 

It all started when I was 10. One day, I walked into the office to ask Mom what she was doing. She told me she was doing genealogy. I said, “Ok,” and walked out.

 

I didn’t think much of it until two years later when I found the passenger list for one of my great-grandfathers and his siblings. I got addicted; I spent the next year or two conducting some genealogy research in between the times I was hanging out with friends and trying to get middle school homework done.

 

In September 2005, when I was 16, Grandmargie (my paternal grandmother) identified numerous photographs for me and told me family stories that were attached to them. She enjoyed it. Roughly three months later, Grandmargie was dying. In the early days of that when she was still lucid and could still speak (and frankly, I could still stand to see her), I interviewed her. I asked her about her parents and her grandparents. And from then on, I’ve been doing genealogy research on-and-off ever since.

 

That’s what I want to do with this blog. I want to focus on my family history in the U.S. and in Central and Eastern Europe. I also want to explore the photos and the objects that were left behind in those boxes and to question, tease, and tell the story behind them. Why do we have them? Who are they from? Where are they from?

 

Welcome to my blog.