Research Gets Harder

At first this ancestry project took off like a rocket.  Though I was only able to work on it in my spare time, the pace of progress fueled my motivation.  Every day I would discover some new link to the past.  Progress got a tremendous boost when I was able to connect online with new-found cousins who were also researching our family history.

After months of research, the project moved forward only in fits and starts.  New discoveries happened just often enough to keep me motivated.  Sometimes a closer look proved my former findings to be questionable as I checked my facts more carefully.  Progress sometimes took a few steps backwards.

It is now well into Year Two of this ancestry project.  It is becoming tedious work.  A new bit of information is a rare treasure.   Every now and then, I choose an ancestor and do an exhaustive search online.  At least once a month, I look for inspiration for a blog entry.  My main focus now is to try to make sense of all the accumulated information.

The next steps are to add more of my family's "hard copy" information and do more research outside of the online environment.  I will look for family documents, analyze them, and scan them into the records.  I will interview the few remaining folks in the generation before me to flesh out the facts with stories.  I will study historical records and read accounts of the places and events that personally affected my ancestors' lives.  Now is where the real detective work begins.

The goal of this project is to provide as complete a genealogy as possible for my children.  I want them to have all of the family stories, pictures, and documents within my reach, to be able to put names and faces to our family's history.

Legacy

I have undertaken this ancestry research as my legacy to my children, my nephews and niece, and to all of their children.  I believe that our life on earth is fleeting and our physical being is not our eternal reality.  However, our sense of self on earth is partly derived from our place in history.  Seeing ourselves on a timeline of people who have come and gone gives us a more authentic perspective.

There is so much family history that died with my grandparents and with the scattering of family records among their descendants.  I am grateful for my youthful urgency in interviewing my great grandmother Zaun before she died.  I was not yet even a teenager, but sat down at the bedside of my Nanny and wrote down all of the names and dates that she could remember about her family.  There were tears in her eyes as she struggled to remember some of the details about her brothers and sisters.  From her memories, I painstakingly created a poster of our family tree (with fountain pen and ink cartridge) that I still have.  This poster was the starting point for my Ancestry research decades later.

I hope that it will be meaningful to my children someday.  I have put all of the photos and documents in my possession on each of the profiles so that it is easy to tell who was related to whom and how we all fit together as a family.  I love my family and especially my children so much - I am so proud to be connected with them in this interesting family!