Can a first cousin, once removed, return?
Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.
Genealogists never die, they just lose their roots.
That's strange; half my ancestors are WOMEN!
Genealogy: A hay stack full of needles. It's the threads I need.
Every family tree has some sap in it.
Genealogy: Chasing your own tale!
Genealogists live in the past lane.
Genealogy: Where you confuse the dead and irritate the living.
My ancestors are hiding in a witness protection program.
Genealogy: It's all relative in the end anyway.
Research: What I'm doing, when I don't know what I'm doing.
The only thing I know for sure is that I come from a long line of dead people.
Genealogy: Tracing yourself back to better people.
Theory of relativity: If you go back far enough, we're all related.
FLOOR: (n) The place for storing your priceless genealogy records.
I trace my family history so I will know who to blame.
Life takes it's toll. Have exact change ready!.......................................Author(s) Unknown |
Ms. Brown's "I Want" article was originally posted in 1994 to the National Genealogical Conference, FIDO bulletin board forum.
Yep -- I want ancestors with names like Rudimentary Montagnard or Melchizedick von Steubenhoffmannschild or Spetznatz Gianfortoni, not William Brown or John Hunter or Mary Abbott.
I want ancestors who could read and write, had their children baptized in recognized houses of worship, went to school, purchased land, left detailed wills (naming a huge extended family as legatees), had their photographs taken once a year -- subsequently putting said pictures in elaborate isinglass frames annotated with calligraphic inscriptions, and carved voluble and informative inscriptions in their headstones. I want relatives who managed to bury their predecessors in established, still-extant (and indexed) cemeteries.
I want family members who wrote memoirs, who enlisted in the military as officers and who served in strategically important (and well documented) skirmishes. I want relatives who served as councilmen, schoolteachers, county clerks and town historians. I want relatives who 'religiously' wrote in the family Bible, journaling every little event and detailing the familial relationship of every visitor.
In the case of immigrant progenitors, I want them to have arrived only in those years wherein passenger lists were indexed by National Archives, and I want them to have applied for citizenship, and to have done so only in those jurisdictions which have since established indices.
I want relatives who were patriotic and clubby, who joined every patrimonial society they could find, who kept diaries, and listed all their addresses, who had paintings made of their horses, and who dated every piece of paper they touched. I want forebears who were wealthy enough to afford, and to keep for generations, the tribal homestead, and who left all the aforementioned pictures and diaries and journals intact in the library.
But most of all, I want relatives I can find!!!
Barbara A. Brown
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