I can’t believe how excited I am about this, but the first batch of obituaries I requested from the library came in the mail today. Hoyt Library in my hometown, which has been around for like a 100-plus years, has a great local history and genealogy collection, and they make copies of Microfiche obits for free. (Okay, they’ll accept good-faith donations, so I do plan to send them a check.)

Today I got:

• My grandmother, Ruth
• Her first husband, Robert
• Robert’s father, Joseph (my great grandfather)
• Joseph’s father, Alva (my great-great grandfather)
• and Alva’s wife, Elizabeth (my great-great grandmother)

Like the Census records I’ve been digging in, these are just snapshots. But they do have a few details I didn’t know, and mention a few people I wasn’t aware of. For instance, Census records indicate Alva Johnson was a farmer, but his obituary says he came to Saginaw to be a coal prospector. That’s a fascinating career transition, gramps.

Now, to order my next batch. This is fun. If you’re lame (like me).

So many things to do, so few hours to do them. I transferred this domain to a new host at the end of February and signed up for another three years of hosting. At the time, I made a promise to myself to get back to writing (which I do enjoy). Fat lot of progress I’ve made on that front, huh?

Life’s been crazy busy, between an impending son or daughter, running, house fix-it projects and, my latest obsession, genealogy. My mind is made to pull little strings of obscure data, so I take naturally to research. That research being about my family serves as an added bonus. I bought a copy of Mac Family Tree, a birthday present to myself, and in just a few weeks have managed to track down at least some details on 139 relatives through Census and other records. It gets pretty fuzzy earlier than 1820, but I’ve tentatively tracked one of my mom’s lines to the birth of John Johnson about 1788 somewhere in Delaware. I guess 221 years qualifies as a wicked-long time.

I’m sure everyone reading this will give me a good eye-roll, but I find it fascinating.

Base on the sources I’ve built up, I plan to write posts exploring the lives of individual ancestors.  That’s ancestors, so you living people related to me have nothing to worry about privacy-wise. I have sources enough to write short profiles of several people, so I’m not sure who I’ll start with. The most likely candidates are both great-great grandfathers on my mother’s line: Charles Henry Barber and Alvah Wilson Johnson. The former I find interesting because he fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, the latter because he’s the one who brought the line of Johnsons I belong to into my hometown.

So, stay tuned. With any luck I’ll have more posts soon on topics that only I could find interesting.