Genealogy Huntress

I consider myself a genealogist, amateur, but I'm pretty good at being patient when hunting and searching the internet for anything and everything I might get my hands on for my family history.  

But what happens after that?

I'm still trying to come up with something that will work for all of my data, my documentation, and mostly for the stories that I do have, few that they are.  

I don't want them getting lost in a shuffle of papers after I'm gone.  So I guess going digital is the best way to handle it.  I have been putting my stories into one little blog blurb after another.  My sister was getting an email every time I posted, and she told me I needed to put these on Facebook.  Well, I spent all last summer posting a photo every day, putting what little I knew about each photo, or persons, in some kind of story.  But the family?  eh.  They looked but barely acknowledged the efforts.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not doing this for some kind of kudos or a thumbs up "like" from folks.  I just think it's information that needs to be recorded, to be shared.  Because I honestly believe that it's hard to know where you're going if you don't know where you come from.  

Or maybe I'm just some kind of "not your ordinary" person who thinks all of this is important.  Does it matter where the family came from?  Or who did what and when?  Maybe not.  But I'm very interested in trying to locate our history.  Maybe it became ... ok, I'll admit it ... an obsession when none of my grandparents were willing to discuss anything of the past.  At all.  Grandma Myrtle would always tell me "just let sleeping dogs lie".  Grandpa Pape, he never even got the name of this father's sister correct.  We always thought it was Anna.  Turns out it was Emma!   Or that they traveled here with their Uncle when then emigrated.  What's the big deal? And Great Grandpa's wife, no one truly knew her maiden name, and there wasn't any discussion as to why she was committed into Fergus Falls State Hospital -- back then it was because you weren't .... stable enough to live a complete life?

All these little oddities that come up -- I have always looked for answers.  Haven't gotten many, and some of the research has been difficult, because in many cases, farming families were too poor to even have a burial or a headstone, so that data just disappears as well.  

It always makes me wonder if somewhere down the line, some great grandchild of mine will inherit my genealogy bug.

I hope so.