In 1969, I received a letter from a cousin I never knew and would not meet for over 20 years hence. It was a brief outline of my paternal family beginning with a great grandfather who was born in 1849. 1849!?!? I couldn’t get my teenage head wrapped around that concept! 1849…. The letter held my interest for a couple of days. I asked my father if he knew anything about the information in the letter. He knew his own immediate family: mother, father, grandmother and a couple of half-siblings, but that was the extent of it. The letter was folded and put away for a number of years. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you!” was the typical response from him about his family and pretty much the same from my mother. I knew her mother, my grandmother, as she lived next store to us in the old Victorian duplex in Springfield, MA along with my 2 maiden aunts. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you!”
Fast forward to 1997. I’m now living alone and I was looking for some software to load onto my new computer. “Family Tree Maker” practically jumped off the shelf, promising to help me find those lost treasures of family fame and fortune. I pulled out the letter from my cousin and began a family tree. It began slow and built into quite the “hobby” and now the “profession”. My personal data base contains over 39,000 family members, some of whom are still alive!
I’ve now branched out into a field that couldn’t be farther from the profession I’ve been in from my youth. I’ve begun writing this genealogy blog, I continue as a research associate at the Museum of Springfield History, I belong to a number of professional genealogical associations (New England Historic Genealogical Society, Massachusetts Genealogical Council, the Association of Professional Genealogists among others) and I’ve given a variety of genealogy presentations and classes to a variety of groups and clubs in this area as well as a course entitled “Introduction to Genealogy and Family Research”.
Married since 2007 to Karen, I couldn’t be happier. She’s a fabulous partner and also an avid genealogist, although she’ll say she’s not as avid as me! Well, maybe she’s right, but she’s still a fabulous partner and extraordinarily helpful and supportive.
Hi Dave,
I saw that you responded to my e-mail sent to you on an old account. It was about the link to sarah hanks and william H morgan. My husband cousin, Leonard Morgan, did a family search. I do not know where it came from but according to it this morgan clan arrived on the ship “Mary” in mass. 1635 from England. James, John, and Miles originally from Glamorgan Wales. Miles is the J.P. Morgan clan, James stayed in the area but john left the area due to objection to witch trials and settled in Virginia, this is the part of the clan that progressed to North Carolina, and later was an early pioneer to Amite Co. Mississippi. william H (debated as possibly horace OR hamilton) morgan married sarah hanks in st landry parish, Louisiana. sarah hanks ‘ father was E. A. Blackmon Hanks from Texas. They got there through Steven Hanks a Mott descendant. My husband’s grandfather was one of William H. Morgan’s children, lemuel reams morgan sr. a southern baptist minister. It would be great if you could confirm any of this, Leonard’s tree is on ancestry. Morgan family tree
I wanted to thank you again for leaving that link on my site. I wish there was a way to click a Like on your site, because although I enjoy coming here, I don’t always have the time to comment. It was very thoughtful of you to bring that video of the old films to PacificParatrooper!!
Glad to spread it around! It has certainly made the rounds since I shared it…I’m happy that the blog showed up as some have disappeared and WordPress has no explanation. I posted again tonight, but I’m not sure if it’s visible. I’ll have to wait and see what happens.
Hey, we saw your post in WP.com’s forum and since the thread is already closed, we thought we could reach you through your blog, right here!
The thing is, Zemanta unfortunately doesn’t work in the WordPress’s default Dashboard anymore, but can be easily re-installed via our browser extension.
It comes with all the features you’re already used to (images, in-text links, related posts & tags) and is really easy to set it up. Just follow the link to our downloads page and install the appropriate extension for your browser.
Here’s the link: http://zem.si/PqCSDD
And please do let me know how it goes or if you have any more questions what-so-ever, since I’ll be more than glad to help you out!
Here’s my email address: support[at]zemanta[dot]com
Take care & I’m looking forward to your reply!
Best,
Silvo
Thank you for visiting and following my blog. I’m looking forward to following yours! 🙂
Great concept for a blog! You might want to check out one of my blogs, The Writer’s Stuff (http://thewritersstuff.wordpress.com/); I cover things about writing, but also history; at the moment I’m making public my grandfather’s journals from the second world war; sparse, but fascinating. It would be great to see more photos… the more historical images, the better! 🙂
Thanks for the visit and the comment. I’ll certainly take a look at thewritersstuff and poke around a bit! I wish I had more photos, but most of Clem’s album has been posted…I suppose I could start repeating some things to keep them toward the top. I might take a few other pictures that I have of him and post them as well. I have a shot of him and my grandmother holding me all bundled up when I was about 5 or 6 months old. Occasionally, I try to find contemporary photos of the places he mentions in “Lest We Forget”.
Definitely worth the research; some relative of yours, somewhere, has photos – I’ve started gathering my own family’s photos and either scanning them in, or even photographing them with a digital camera to preserve them digitally…
Sadly, they’re all gone. Anything and everything that was available is right behind me here in my office loaded into moderately organized boxes, files, folders, whatever! Much is unidentified so posting it may not appear as anything but curiosities. I have “Post Cards” with pictures of people and places that were never sent to anyone. Thus I have no idea who is on the card or who was the intended recipient. But I keep it all. I found a family 2nd cousins, 3 siblings and their spouses, who actually lives near us. They are all aged 65-75. We all agreed to meet and bring our photos in case each of us could identify the other’s collections. It turned out that about half of what I have matched about half of what they had! We shared common great grandparents…
Fascinating! Good luck to you; I’d encourage you to seek out that “separation of six degrees”… someone you know knows someone you know who knows, and all that. I’ve tracked down some pretty impossible things in my life, including missing persons on several occasions, so if you need any ideas, just let me know! Otherwise, more power to you on your quest!