All Things Family

 The family of man--or in this case, the family of this woman. 

I have been obsessed with family history since I was a teenager, many more years than I'm willing to admit to, but it's all my father's fault.  Dad began his quest for answers back in the 1970s, literally the stone age of genealogy.  Dad's initial quest was to find information about his father, a man he'd never met, nor did he have any information about at all beyond his name and the fact that he'd been in the Navy. Dad grew up amongst his mother's family.  The people in his maternal family who could possibly answer the questions Dad had were unwilling to do so.

Dad's quest turned out to be bittersweet.  He found out that his father had been killed in 1938, actually murdered, when Dad was 8 years old.  Dad was able to meet his father's former wife and learn a wealth of information about the paternal half of his DNA.  With every answered question, Dad wanted to know even more about his family as a whole and this developed into a serious obsession, particularly when he added my mother's family into the mix.  Dad's obsession infected me when he told me about a ggg-grandfather who was a bigamist or so it seems.  It was then that I decided that maybe genealogy was so boring after all!

No, Dad never finished his quest and when he passed away in the 1980s, his research left many, many unanswered questions.  My brother, who'd also been infected by the genealogy bug, and I split up the tons of paper research Dad left behind.  Together, we work to find answers.  Today, we have computers and DNA.  Dad would never leave the keyboard if he were here with current technology and he'd have been the first person to spit in a tube!

So here I am, still looking for answers, trying to solve the mysteries of my particular universe.  

This blog is about the mysteries yet unsolved.



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