I am currently adding new genealogy posts to my new blog
The House That Never Slumbers. Please visit me there!
For me, it all started with a box of old pictures. One year a man came to our annual family reunion. He was from a maternal branch of the family, and he was working on a large family history project. Our family happened to be one of the branches of the
Joshua B. Sharp Family. He was recruiting family members to collect data on living ancestors and to digitize old photographs. I was one of the youngest people at the family reunion, and at that time, one of the few computer users.
This man's presentation at the reunion prompted my great-aunt to go into her attic searching for a box of photos she had acquired upon the death of her mother (my great-grandmother). The photos were thrown haphazardly into the box through the years. Very few of them were labeled. My grandpa and my great-aunt were able to identify some of the subjects, but there were many others they did not know. I was intrigued. I wanted to know the identities of those in the photos - stern-faced older ladies, working men, young couples full of promise, small smirking children. These were presumably my people, but how did they connect to me? I was quickly hooked on the search.
My aunt allowed me to borrow the box of photos in order to scan them and save them to CD's that could be distributed to other family members. While the photos were in my possession, I spent hours pouring over them with a lighted magnifying glass in hand (this is a great tool for genealogist, by the way). I was slowly able to provide labels for more and more individuals by comparing between photos. Sometimes one photo would provide a name or two that I could use to identify the same child in another photo. By emailing photos to other members working on other branches for the family history project, I was able to find distant cousins who also had copies of some of my photos which had been labeled by their ancestors.
Of course, it wasn't enough to just put names with faces. Once I knew the names, I needed to know their stories . . .