Okay, so I really do not have an excuse or at least a valid excuse as to why I haven't blogged about my 8 year journey tracing my family roots. So this year I've decided was THE year to get up off of my ass and actually blog. How hard can it be, right? Well after mulling over all the various free platforms, I opted to use Blogger. Setting up this blog site wasn't exactly a piece a cake and it's always going to be under construction because I am my own worst enemy when it comes to design. So it is officially Spring 2015 (although I can't get a 70 degree day to stick) and I am officially a genealogy blogger! YAAAAAAAY!
So my hope is to chronicle my journey moving forward and provide some insight of my past activities while making friends along the way.
I remember when genealogy consisted of going to family reunions and watching the elders piece together a family tree while passing around photos from the early 20th century. Genealogy and family history used to mean that I would rummage through my grandmother's old keepsakes and ask her every 3rd picture, "Who's this grandma?". Then in the midst of the dot com boom in the mid to late 1990's and early 2000's, genealogy became a little more accessible. Then by the mid 2000's I discovered Ancestry.com. At first I wasn't sure what to do there, so I just created an account and took advantage of the free trial. Then I remembered all of those family reunions that went to as an adolescent. Then I remembered my grandmother and her cousins sat down and constructed the Martin Family Tree. The tree was nothing to sneeze at. There was a total of 7 generations on the tree, with me being apart of the 6th generation. So I asked my mother for the tree and began to create an electronic version of it on Ancestry.com. Fast forward to the age of social media and now I can find like minded individuals by the the thousands! They now have autosomal, MtDNA and Y-DNA tests that can not only give me ethnicity and population sets, these tests connect me to distant and perhaps not so distant relatives!
In 8 years I have found cousins through traditional methods, through strategic stalking on social media (Don't judge me!), through autosomal DNA tests and various social media groups on Facebook...and I never once set up a blog to chronicle my journey :( I'm disappointed and disillusioned by the course of inaction and the path I have taken! So now I'm here to correct and wrong. I'm blogging because it's time. The Old Testament says the #8 signifies a new beginning. So I hope my commentary is well received and I hope that blogging will give me just as much joy as the research has. I truly hope that anyone who comes across this blog will enjoy it and find it informative. I'm taking many people as I can along for the ride. Will you come join me?
Welcome to blogging and to blogger (my family history blog is here too). I think you're smart to have waited to have several years of research under your belt before blogging as both take time and it's hard to keep up the blog if you're base arching for "new" material at the same time. It would be ice to have the fallback of years of stories to write up (can you tell I pretty much started blogging and researching at the same time?). Have you considered joining Gene-bloggers? It's a great resource and way to connect with other bloggers/ family historians & genealogists too. I'm on my phone or I'd give you a link. Google Geneabloggers. There's a website and Facebook group page. Anyway, I look forward to reading your blog. Have fun!
ReplyDeleteHi Jo!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for the advice. I actually joined Geneabloggers in LinkedIn a few years back and will join the other social media pages as well. I have so many stories to pen and so many in draft that I don't know what to do with myself. In the midst of penning a post another thing pops up in my mind and I immediately start writing about it. LOL I can't wait to share more and to read and learn more from others.