Family has always been incredibly important to me. I was raised all my life to believe that family was the most important thing. So I'm very proud to have the family I do and also very glad that a cousin has done huge amounts of research into our family history.
However, there is always more to know, and different branches that haven't been researched. So lately what has taken up my time has been kicking around on genealogy websites and I have found a tremendous amount of information.
First off, I've always had a problem with ancestry.com charging you to find information on Your.Own.Family. That bothers me to no end. I myself think it is more than ridiculous. It's crazy and shouldn't be allowed. On my scale it's somewhere between the level of a crime and a sin.
So here I am bopping around on the internet, foaming at the mouth at the audacity of the aforementioned genealogy ripoff I mean website, and I stumbled upon this:
The US GenWeb Project
http://www.usgenweb.org/
The skies opened up and the angels sang. A free genealogy site? What?! Who would have thought! What an idea! Free access to your own heritage?? Amazing!
(Pauses to wipe the sarcasm off the computer screen..wipe wipe wipe)
Okay. But a free genealogy website that you can actually find stuff on is great. I actually found a very distant relative on there that had a page about my Great-Grandmother's family, which I knew absolutely nothing about. With all the information he had online, I was about to trace her family back six generations, to 1715 in Amelia County, Virginia. I was even able to find where my fifth generation grandfather was buried, and that most of the individuals of that last name in the county my family is from are related to me in some way. I even found where most of them are buried.
Now I'm researching those and the other branch of my family and who served in the civil war with on the National Park Service Soldiers and Sailors System:
http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/
I've found 52 name matches and so I've narrowed them down based on location of where the regiments were formed. Now to find information on each of them based on their name. Lot of work to do. I'm no where near done and then I have a lot more to do in different areas of research.
I'm loving this. I am having a great time. Maybe I should think about a career in genealogy? Hmm.
