Finding your roots can be addictive!

I had a few minutes tonight while I waited for my Peruvian student to show up online, so I started looking for family records on ancestry.com.  It's an hour and 45 minutes later and I finally closed the search windows!  (My student must have forgotten our appointment.)

You can find cool things like military registration cards with signatures of your relatives.  Doesn't seeing the signature make him seem more real?

In addition to the paid site, ancestry.com, you can also go to the FREE site http://www.familysearch.org.  Lots of great information on both sites.

My second appointment of the day

 . . . was at 8:00 am!  What do you think this staid and not-too-dusty room is?

It is our Family History Center!  Atually, it's about half of it.  The other half has some microfilm/fiche readers in it, soon to be remodeled with more computers and fewer readers.  In addition, we are going through the card catalog to see which of our collection are available to read online for free.  I think those books will be donated or sold.

So the 8:00 appointment was a bi-monthly meeting of all the volunteers.  I think they need to provide cinnamon rolls and milk for the next meeting.  Perhaps I'll volunteer to provide it all.  Or can you eat in a library?

I still don't love my obligation to volunteer at the FHC, but I'm looking at it as an opportunity to help others while I learn to be a real genealogist.  Win-win, right?

A little family history

One of Bill's dad's great-great grandmothers was born into slavery in the early 1800s.  Since the descendent is actually my f-i-l's stepfather, we don't have any blood relation,, but Bill's father changed his name to that of his stepfather, so we feel a kinship.

 For years Bill has wanted to visit the historic family home in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and we finally had a chance.

 We arrived after the house had closed for the day, but the tour guide was still there and when Bill made an impassioned plea to see the home of his ancestor, Pelagie Amoureux, he relented and gave us the grand, family-only tour. ;-)

Here is some information about Pelagie Amoureux:

Her timeline

How I spent my Wednesday morning

One of the older ladies at Church is a genealogy buff and told me one of the many things she does to make information available to others is to take pictures of headstones in cemeteries, then upload the pictures and the information from them to http://www.findagrave.com/. This gal uses a walker and I figured she couldn't get around to take pictures very well, so I offered to pick her up and go to the cemetery and she could tell me where to take pictures.

I've been to this cemetery before and let me tell you: it is no easy "walk across manicured lawns, pausing to bend down and take a picture every few feet" kind of task to photograph there. It is a hard scrabble cemetery on a serious hill. The roads between each long row had been recently graded and the dirt was soft. I climbed up and down the hills and up and down the graves to get the pictures. There were many unmarked graves and ones with 35 year old funeral home markers that were almost impossible to read. There were many homemade grave markers as well. It made me sad that many families can't afford or don't choose to buy or make even a tiny headstone to mark their loved one's burial place.

This unflattering picture of me shows what happens when someone says, "Oh, just plant a bush on me and let me go back to nature." I had quite a time getting in to photograph the business side of that stone. There were a few like that.

I took about 225 pictures today and I was beat! It was getting hot and I'm, ahem, not accustomed to all the climbing and crouching I did today. I hope to get back at least one more time with my friend before we move.