Thank you, Ken. This is one of those posts that goes straight to my heart — and to where I am genealogically speaking. As you know, I’ve been taking courses through NIGS, and I’ve been doing a lot of reading, and recently I’ve been bouncing land records off a lawyer relative of my husband’s in order to make sure I understand what the documents are telling me. Just last month I signed up to go to Samford for the IGHR week in June. I would love to be able to go to Chicago (it’s an easy drive for me), but I’ll be first entertaining a son and his wife who will be visiting, and then heading off to drive to Birmingham while the NGS conference is progressing. But maybe someday . . .

The thing that’s important is getting the education wherever and however I can. But I think a person starting out in genealogcy has to experience either the black hole of ‘where do I go from here?’ or the brick wall of ‘did he just turn up under a rock?’ or finding posted information that doesn’t make sense (in my case it was an ancestral file saying my ggggg-grandmother was both her son’s wife and his mother). And then you stop and go, “Wait a minute!” and then you start getting serious about finding out the truth of the matter.

The education is tremendous. It never stops. And it’s such fun to learn about all the places they went and the people they met, these dead relatives of ours! And besides them, as a result of my improved education, I now have a closet full of ex-ancestors if anyone wants them. Just today I found a home for a few!

cheers,
Barbara