Family Ties

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. 
 

I don't do winter weather.

Yeah.  I don't run in the winter weather.  The very idea is a contradiction in terms.  Running on ice?  Almost physically impossible.  I picture myself sort of looking like those cartoons, or like my dogs do:  try to zoom out of there and you wind up doing a very ridiculous looking version of the "running man," so popular back in the nineties.  Was that really considered a dance move?  But I digress.
Really.  I stay home, in my jammies on the couch, usually wrapped in a blanket because I freeze.  Not my type of season.  Hot tea is the order of the day.  Dogs draped over my lap and excessive amounts of BookFacing, reading and generally ignoring the fact that the day exists at all.  The books in on reserve at the library, the grocery store, and the ever-continuing search for employment have to wait. 
This usually means by the end of the day that I am Losing.My.Mind.  Heaven help me if the bad weather lasts longer than a day.  Its not pretty.  Believe me.  I start looking at my tennis rackets and thinking about strapping some bungee cords to those babies and snowshoeing my tush out of this state.  Because I don't drive in bad weather. 
But one good thing has come of this desire to be productive; Buns on the Run!  I'm fighting the urge to raise my arms to the sky and shout, "look what I have createeeeedd!!"  Don't worry, I'll spare you.  But a blog of my very own!  I'm rather proud. 
I'd like to thank the academy...
Well not really but there you have it.  The beginning of my foray into blogging.