So I sign up for Ancestry.com for 6 months...one of those discounted memberships that let's me see the world. It's time to do some genealogy work on my family and my hub wants to participate too.
Now you've all see those ads for Ancestry....find your family....hit the little green leaf and off you go....whooosh down your ancestry lane finding your Renaissance great great great great great grandfather etc etc.
So the first day we get out account.....I sit down and look at my poor straggly tree (which currently looks like it's the prototype for the Charlie Brown Xmas video...you remember the thin little crooked tree?) and I poke around. The leaves I have on my tree which contain hints obviously come from some cousins which used the free trail for two weeks and plucked down some names of immediate family I know already. Yes I know my aunt and I know my uncle died ....not exactly helpful....and certainly not going beyond the last 50 years of family history.
Then my hub tries his hand at his family tree.....presses a COUPLE of leaves...and viola....he has at least 400 years of history on one side and maybe 200 years on the side....complete with photos from relatives who visited Czechoslovakia and took pictures of a house his family and succeeding generations lived in for a 100 years ...etc etc etc.
MUST BE NICE.
So every time he goes on Ancestry, I give him a dirty look....and say something snide like , "Adding another 100 years to your tree? finding another branch that goes back maybe a thousand years????"
SIGH.
As for me.....I believe I now know all of my grandmother's siblings. Hooray. Do I know all of their descendants? No....because each sibling had like 100 kids (or at least 10) and in my family....people loved to keep the same names around.....Joseph, John, Frank.....plus the same middle name too....so this makes research interesting. Am I looking at Joseph John Frank's record the ORIGINAL born in the 1880's or the Joseph John Frank record from the guy born 1910 or his cousin WITH THE SAME NAME born 1920?
Well....on my Lithuanian side, I have at least found cousins doing heroic work during World War II and being accused of book smuggling.....obtaining Lithuanian books about history and culture and smuggling them into Lithuanian after the Russians took over and banned native language books.
Ha....better than my husband's relatives...who obviously were sitting in their huts....documenting their ancestors by candlelight.
Oh this family research is going to take a very very long time........
