Discovering my roots

No no, I am not talking about my hair, although, now that you mention it, they are getting quite noticeable.

I have been interested in family history for years. I am probably the only one of my siblings who has that interest. I remember times of curling up and listening to stories of our family. Some of it I remember and some of it is gone.

I remember visiting my maternal grandfather and he was actually willing to share some stories (he was very reluctant to share details). My mom pulled me aside and said "Go listen! There will come a time when he isn't around and you will no longer have that chance."  How right she was. (sshhh don't read that so loud...she might hear you and know I admitted this :-)

My paternal grandmother had 'a book' done up by a genealogist on her husband's family. It traced roots back to Palentine Germany in the 1600s and followed their trail to the US and then up to Canada.  A couple years before she passed she gave the book to me to read. Boy am I glad she did. I may not have gotten it after she passed as my dad's brother seems to have...............errr.....................appropriated all the family pictures and such.  I am not letting this book out of my hands or I will never see it again.

We have a couple books done about the regions my parents grew up in and the families that lived there.

While my mom was in the hospital in early December, her words of long ago came back to me. "Go listen! There will come a time when you will no longer have that chance."

I started asking dad stories to distract him while she was in surgery.  He remembered some and I filled in some details with what I remembered. He said "we need to find  a way to get the rest of the information" and asked me about those ads he had seen on TV for ancestry.ca

Just seeing that little sparkle in his tired and sad eyes was enough for me. I pulled out my IPAD (from work) and my credit card, and subscribed for a  year right there and then.

We started searching and it was not hard to start with the details we had. He was really interested in what I was finding.

In the hours I sat by mom's bedside as she drifted in and out of sleep, I kept exploring. At one point I was looking at a census artifact for my dad's side, and found a few of my mom's on the same page. I laughed and she asked what I found. I mentioned a name and she started blabbing, "well he was married to so and so and their kids were....and they had his brother living with him."   I said 'yup, that's all here on this document.". She laughed and said "Well you didn't need to sign up then did you? I already know all that."

In my ever loving way I said "Look lady you were unconscious and quite unwilling to answer my questions...". She smiled.  

In the past couple weeks I have had great fun following the trees up and up. I have found an uncle of my mom's who we didn't know existed. They came over from Poland.....second marriage...etc etc. I found a granddaughter of another uncle my mom just barely remembers. There was some sort of a falling out and years later, my mom remembers a reunion between the brothers. I found a picture this  granddaughter posted and without even looking at the names, I knew which one he was. He looked just like grandpa.  I have now connected with this woman and we are starting to share.

I found the links for our pirate ancestor. I knew about him for years now but found the artifacts to back it up.

I found out that one of my dad's great great uncles was hung for killing his wife...strangled her to death. Lovely.

I am locked out of databases that are in the US or UK, but I am realizing that those trails are much easier to track than my mom's side where it links into villages in Poland and Russia and those varying boundaries back then.

My cost for the year is $119. Seeing the excitement in my parents' eyes makes it well worth it. We need to start going through pictures and beginning to add. My mom wants to go to the city in the spring and find her grandmother's grave...things like that.

I have shaved this money off my jars over the month of December. A bit from gas. A bit from groceries. A bit from entertainment.

For those of you who use it - I ask - at the end of the year when my membership expires, IF I chose not to continue to pay, what happens to my tree? Does it disappear? Or does it remain in some sort of stasis, waiting for me to pay again to see it again?

An impulse buy? yup. But I do recognize that the keepers to the stories behind all these names, have less time left on earth, rather than more.