​We’ve been summering hard here and it hasn’t left me much time to get online and write. Right now I’m on my front porch swing drinking some ice tea while my kids play, so it seems like a good time to catch up.  

​With Adam traveling to NYC for work, the kids and I drove up to stay with my folks for a few days this week. It was nice to have an extra set of hands to help with the kids and I got a little free time for myself (to thrift shop, of course!) The visit also gave me a chance to go through some boxes of family photos and JACKPOT!! It was like finding treasure! I will devote a few different posts my discoveries! Until a few weeks ago I didn’t know what my great grandparents on my moms side looked like and now I’ve uncovered maybe half a dozen shots. The other major treasure was an envelope of photo negatives from my mom’s side. There are so many pictures of my mom as a baby and my grandma as a young mom and wife and finding them felt like a little gift sent from the past from my grandma. Now that I have them I can get some good quality enlargements and I’ve even found some images that didn’t make the album (or that someone had borrowed) or that I’ve never seen.

On my dad’s side, he loaned me a book his late cousin Larry had put together about nine years ago right before he passed. It traces my great great father’s involvement in the Civil War based on his regiment’s records and then put side by side with other historical accounts. And there’s a pre-1900 photo of him too!! It brought me a lot of joy to uncover all of these goodies!

On the flip side of all of this, anyone who has invested time into charting her family tree knows for all of the ah ha moments, there are less exciting steps backwards. It’s such a bummer to uncover incorrect information or photos of people no one recognizes. But hey! I’ve found a lot and I’m going to keep working on it for as long as it’s fun. And another underlying thought I’ve been holding onto is this - I have ancestors. They don’t need photos or names for me to know that I am descended from the beginning of humanity! We all are! It’s awesome to put a name to a great grandmother x25, but even if you can’t, it doesn’t mean she’s not back there. ​

Oh! This also reminds me (and please share more info if you have it). I read online the other day that there’s a whole “medieval” team at Family Search of actual researchers and historians to fact check the thousand plus year old records. How cool! ​