“In the Beginning” is the prompt for the first week of 2025’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge. My obsession with genealogy began with Grampy Phil, whose obsession began before the internet made it easy. Growing up, I loved listening to all the family stories from his childhood and those he learned at his grandmother’s knee. He had a room full of photo albums – one for each year starting around 1949, and mixed albums of older pictures. I’d pull the albums off the bowing shelves in his tiny, cluttered office and leaf through them. Grampy wrote to people all over the country searching for relatives and combed all the local Catholic church records for baptisms, marriage, and burial records. He amassed everything in a series of binders, organized in a seemingly haphazard way which made perfect sense to him.
About the time I started college, warehouse stores began selling genealogy software. I was intrigued by the old-fashioned pictures on the box and impressed by all the trees and reports that could be run. With one click of a button, I could generate a report that told me how everyone was related to me. Wouldn’t Grampy love it if instead of all his messy trees with arrows pointing every which way, and notes written in his big, blocky handwriting, he had neat trees and charts that made sense to everyone?
After I bought it and showed the box and instruction booklet to Grampy, he enthusiastically sent me home with his first binder. No one else was interested in “his papers” as Nana called them. I set to work, inputting information on each ancestor. I tackled binder after binder and I was right – he did love all the neat reports and charts.
With my mom’s side in, I decided to tackle my dad’s. His family was much smaller and not as close as my mom’s. I gathered information from my dad, uncle, and grandaunt and added it name by name, fact by fact. As my tree grew, so did my suspicion that all this genealogy stuff just might be addictive!
And that, folks, is how I fell down the rabbit hole. It started with Grampy Phil, and now I’m the keeper of the stories. Hopefully someday, someone else will get sucked into the vortex and pick up the torch.
Comentarios