More wandering in the halls of time --

Well, I was going to write about bird poop today :) but I got stuck wandering around in Ancestry.com again today.  It's a giant sinkhole of time, and today I sucked Grace into it and she got hooked, too.

 

My son's great-great-great-great grandfather.

We sat together, following path after path in both our trees (she's my stepdaughter, so they're different) and in a very short time, she was hooked.  We got so excited when we actually found a relative who served in the Revolutionary War, and then followed that back into the 1600's, but sadly realized at some point that we were barking up the wrong family tree -- she was only related to that person by marriage, not blood.  :(

 The house of my husband's great-great-great grandfather, George Bates.

We're having a blast.  I'll be happy when this two weeks is over and I can switch over to the German site and find something about my family.  I swear I'm going to take a break from it tomorrow, but . . . we'll see.

I promise I will write about the bird poop tomorrow or the next day -- cross my heart and hope to die.

Lost in the corridors of time

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way 

I doubted if I should ever come back.

-- Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"                          

A week ago, I signed up for a two-week trial at Ancestry.com, and I think I've been on it about 100 hours since that time.  I've wanted for quite a while to look into my family history, and now that I've got the time, I thought I'd go for it.

My mom, aged two or so, wearing her much older brother's hat.

If you've ever done it, you know that this kind of endeavor is both exhilarating and frustrating at the same time.  As I mentioned briefly the other day, when you uncover little tidbits that you were completely unaware of (like turning grey at an early age runs in the family), it's exciting but when you run down connection after connection that all turn out not to be the person you're related to, or the trail goes cold because Ancestry doesn't have much in the way of records in that country, you've spent all that time for nothing.  

So far, I've accomplished quite a bit.   I've uncovered a great deal of my son's dad's family, all the way back to an ancestor who was born in 1801 (I really want to break into the 1700's!), and have filled in quite a bit on my side, though I'll have to spring for a one-month membership in the German Ancestry.com to get much farther with that.  I've become pretty obsessive about it -- today I had a number of things on my agenda, but I wound up spending almost all the livelong day chasing down "hints," as they call them.

 Here's my mom again, a little older, a little more bada$$ than in the other picture.

I'm curious whether any of you have gone down this road and have any advice for me.  Is any one of the sites better than another?  Do I need to join more than one?  Have you discovered tricks or do you have any tips that would be helpful?

I've always loved the Robert Frost poem quoted above, and have thought a lot about how "way leads on to way" has been true in my life -- the roads do diverge, we do make choices and at some point can never go back.  I guess it applies to ancestor-hunting too, that you don't know where it leads and in a sense, you can't un-discover things, once they are discovered.  I learned something quite interesting about my grandmother the other day, for example.

I'd love to hear from those who have done this kind of work.  Leave me a comment or send me a message, okay?

It's getting late on Saturday, so -- happy Sunday, one and all.

Randomness Friday

I'm going to start something now and come back to it later - I'm off to a nap break because I didn't sleep well last night.

Anyway, yesterday on the way to the credit union, I saw this little heart on the pavement.  I don't know if it was a piece of wire or something off of someone's jewelry or just a random heart, but I was happy to see it there.

 Link-up to Pixel Art Friday and Your Sunday Best

I layered it with a picture of roses and a texture on the top.  I especially like the bird poop in the upper left corner.  More on bird poop later (I warned you, this post will be random), but now I'm off to Dreamland.  

Later, more randomness:  Yesterday, I was having coffee on a break from my thrift-store tour, and being an inveterate snoop, I became interested in the people at the next table, a man and two young children.  Through the conversation, I figured out that the man was a doctor -- his very intelligent son (maybe 7) was asking him if he ever treated shark bites :)  The little girl (maybe 5) was also very smart -- they were a nice family group, and their conversation was lively.  But the man melted my heart at one moment; he looked out the front door and said, "There goes Mommy -- look how beautiful she looks."  I don't know why, but this just touched me so much -- I looked out and saw a woman pushing a full grocery cart, nice looking, certainly, but dressed for Safeway, her hair done up casually in a scrunchie.  I just loved hearing a man telling his children that their mother is beautiful -- even when she's loading groceries into the car.  

Even more randomness:  Last night I had a lot of fun going to a collaborative "chunky book" recipe exchange at the crafts studio in San Jose where I go to workshops.  There were  seven of us -- we each had brought copies of three recipes and we each decorated  24-4x4 pages with packets we each got and things we brought from home.  At the end, we each got copies of all the pages and recipes.  It was a ton of fun.  Here are a couple of examples (bad cell phone pictures, sorry):

And for my last bit of randomness :) -- I've been doing some genealogical research, and even though it's frustrating because you know your grandfather lived in Brooklyn in 1940 but why isn't he  showing up on the census, you can find out things that are somehow delightful.  On my son's dad's side of the family, I found out that a great uncle of his dad had grey hair by the time he was 29; when I met his dad, he was 26 and also had grey hair.  That just tickles me.

What random things are happening in your life?