Why Bother With Genealogy?
Ever wonder why the folks on your mom's side of the family have prominent ears? Stymied by your left-handed tendencies when everyone in your immediate family uses the right?
To find the answers to questions such as these and many more, genealogy may be the answer. It's more than recording the dates of births, marriages and deaths. Or at least it can be.
While dates are an important part of creating a family history, so too are interesting facts and figures about family members. Dates are just dates, but a true historian wants to dig much deeper than that.
As you research your family's past to create your own history, pay attention to the "little nuggets" you can find out about different family members either in oral histories provided by living relatives or in documents from the past.
Items to pay close attention to if the desire is to make your ancestors more three dimensional are such things as diaries, letters, journals, notes in family bibles and more. These handwritten documents may or may not be easy to come by, but if you can even glean a page or two, you're likely to learn a lot about your relatives than you ever expected.
Recording the little things about the people in your past can also give you a little information about yourself as well. This is what makes the pursuit so much fun.
You might just find out that your great-great grandfather was the lefty and that your grandmother's family is responsible for the giant ears. In the course of your research you might also learn that artistic tendencies run deep on your dad's side of the family while more scholarly pursuits are the mainstay of your mom's ancestors. Each piece of information you find is a personal treasure to hold on tightly to for yourself and the family members that are yet to be.
Recording family history can be a pursuit that's very involved or just a minor pastime. However much effort you put into it, you won't be sorry you started. As you uncover the past, you're likely to be able to make more sense of the present as well.
