2021 Jan 01
Genealogy Themes
My Genealogy
Goal for 2021 is to share things in or out of my family research on a more
consistent level, bu using a series of weekly prompts provided by a fellow
genealogist whose blog I follow.
January
Themes 2021
1-10
Beginnings
11-17 Family
Legend
18-24 Name
Sake
25-31
Favorite Photo
I retired in
August of 2002 and in the following fall I thought I would look into our family
history, a subject which has always intrigued me.
Most of
which was verbal Bits and Pieces from my mom and dad and his cousins in Maine.
On Nancy’s side, I knew very little, but that her grandfather had been interested
in their history as I had once seen a letter he had written to someone in
England.
I had a scrap of paper my mother had jotted down the names of my father’s parents and
grandparents along with her parents and her maternal grandfather and great-grandfather.
On Nancy’s
side I built a tree from scratch, by going to the local libraries in Bristol
and Burlington. I had seen a map that there was a Barnes family living in Burlington,
a mile or so from our house. Turns out 5 generations of Barnes’ lived and died
in our neighborhood and our kids went to school with distant cousins, who knew.
Building a
tree in 2002 was a slow process, the internet was still being expanded and
things were still being digitalized and indexed. I spent most of my efforts on
the Barnes’ side because the records in Connecticut were easier to find. After
building the tree I discovered a FEDEX box in the basement filled with papers
and a tree that great-grandpa Barnes had written back in the early 1900s. Uncle
Howard had taken them home to copy after Dorothy had passed and had returned
them, but we had long forgotten the box. It was a wonderful find as he had
personal knowledge of several generations beyond himself.
So, from a
few scraps of paper, the tree includes many branches of the Larrabee, Balfour,
Steeves, Wrenn, Collins, Freitas, Borges, Barnes, Allen, Conroy, Wallace and
Hawksworth families. There are 744 families with 1984 individuals. To know from
whom you are descended, is to know the tapestry of woven stories of sadness,
loves, accomplishments, and failures, that you are a product of people that
will persevere. What we’ve faced in 2020 is just a bump in the road.
Next
installment – Family Legend’s
Posted also
on: https://abitofthepieces.blogspot.com/
