Recently a nice surprise arrived in my inbox from my Great Aunt Alice. She sent this photo given to her by my great grandfather, Joseph Russel Johnson.

Sproats and Johnsons c. 1905

The photo, likely taken in fall 1905, shows Joseph Russel at age 8. It features much of his mom’s family on the occasion of her parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. The couple, Joseph and Elizabeth Sproat, sit in the front row. They are my great-great-great grandparents and were born in Pennsylvania in the 1830s. Their daughter, Elizabeth Ella Sproat, married my great-great grandfather, Alvah Wilson Johnson. Alvah and Elizabeth’s third child, Joseph Russel — my great grandfather, stands center front in a white shirt.

Alvah Wilson Johnson (who’s not in the picture, though his wife and kids are) brought my Johnson line to Michigan. Alvah, raised as a farmer in southern Ohio, came to the Saginaw, Mich., area as a coal prospector in 1889, according to his obituary.

Alvah and Elizabeth Johnson also bore Harold, standing on the far left, and Mary, who stands behind Joseph in white with a bow in her hair.

Other people in the picture are various distant cousins. Other interesting bits:

• The woman in the dark dress on the right of the doorway in back is Jennie Johnson, who is Alvah Wilson Johnson’s oldest sister (and my great-great grand aunt). The Johnson siblings married Sproat siblings, Jennie to Charles and Alvah to Elizabeth. Charles Sproat stands next to wife Jennie in back, behind his younger sister Elizabeth (Alvah’s wife).
• The young girl in the dark dress in front is Clara Sproat. She’s the youngest daughter of Charles and Jennie. She’s the mother of John Glenn, the senator and astronaut.

Confused? Don’t worry. I’m sure this is only interesting to me, and even I had to draw a diagram.

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.

On a recent trip to my hometown I stayed up late with family rummaging through old photographs and bottles of wine. The whole experience left me thinking about connections and roots, and I’m edging toward taking on a family tree project.

As I think about all of these branches, the complexity of such a project almost overwhelms me. I followed a couple branches in a brief interview with my mother, and came up with more than two dozen people. That covers just first cousins, my mom and her brothers and sisters, and my maternal grandparents. One thing quickly became clear: This project can be started, but never finished.

That got me thinking about scope. Where do I want to take this? The most important limb to follow for me, right now, runs through my maternal grandparents to their parents. Tracking down important names, faces and dates through that generation should keep me busy for a while.

I ordered Genealogy Online for Dummies from the local library with the hopes that it can offer tips to focus my efforts. I find myself asking questions like, do I need to keep track of relatives’ religious affiliations? How do I handle second marriages? What about children from earlier marriages? Hopefully, reading up can help me learn to track and file all of these kernels.

If either of my readers has taken on genealogy project, do drop me a line. Tell me about your efforts — what mistakes you’ve make, what successes you’ve had. I’d love to hear about them.