Flipside: In The Beginning

Amy Johnson Crow has a 52 Ancestors Week blog challenge which I have decided to give a try for the second year. Last year I made it until the end of May. Then summer, gardening and vacations took over my life. Here we go again.

The first prompt for week #1 (January1-7) is In The Beginning.

In the beginning, I had next to no idea of my ancestors past my living grandparents and one great grandmother. I worked full time, had two children and continued working. Genealogy was not something I had any interest in and probably couldn't even spell it.

Roots on television is my memory of the beginning of my ancestry interest. My eldest son had to do a Roots project for school, and I believe it was after the 1988 airing of Roots: The Gift.

We had an early home edition of a computer and a land line. My parents were of little assistance in getting me back more than a generation. I had old photo albums on my Mom's side of the family. My father supplied a family chart of the Vanguilder's which I later found that the surname was misspelled. 😁

Back in the late 1980's and early 1990's, there was some information on the Internet. USGenWeb and RootsWeb are two I remember. With a lot of trial and error in search engines, I was able to find that my Mom's Mom was born in Columbiana County, Ohio and I was off and running.

I'd drop my kids off at school and head to the Cleveland Museum of History where there was a room full of old census microfilm and books. Columbiana County, Ohio had an active historical group and there were books of marriages and burials. Hallelujah

1880 Ohio Census
Columbiana County, Fairfield Township
June 19, 1880

The memory of the first time I scrolled through the 1880 Columbiana County census and found my grandmother and her family still sends goosebumps up my arms.

Family Tree Maker became my program, then Ancestry, Find a Grave, GeneaBloggers and two online newspaper subscriptions one in the UK and one in the states. Two genealogy websites and a blog later, I am at 2025 and still poking around looking for some new piece of information.

Over the decades I have accumulated numerous family items from pottery that made it across the pond in the early 1900's, tin types, cabinet cards and carte d'visites, etc.

Flipside is slowly becoming the repository of photos and stories about all this memorabilia as well as biographies of my ancestors. Even after thirty-five years of research I still have some brick walls.

And what makes all this worth it? Occasionally I receive an email from a distant relation who has located me through my family website or Flipside and we share information.

I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU. All comments are welcome; however, if they are inappropriate, they will not be published. PLEASE post your e-mail in the comment section if you would like to network about a particular surname or topic. I will capture it for my use only and not include it when I publish your comment.