As I've mentioned on more than one occasion, I love researching family trees.
One might say it is a passion with me (I call the hobby "looking for dead people").
I subscribe to several genealogy magazines and still find them interesting to read, even after more than twenty years!
One might think that after this many years of digging, I might have located all the dead people there are to be found in my ancestry.
But not so.
Years ago, I used to spend nearly every Saturday at the Family History Centre and would painstakingly churn away at the microfiche reader, hoping to find my family members.
And oh the excitement when I got a hit!
I've amassed an incredible amount of documentation in my years of research (and spent a king's ransom doing it too!). Most people research one line or another when they start this hobby.
Not I. In spite of all the advice to the contrary, I jumped in with both feet, researching both my mother's line and my father's line simultaneously.
Every so often, I take a side-trip and research someone else's family (very good friends only need apply). When I do that, I put my tree aside and concentrate totally on the task at hand. Over the past couple of years, I've taken on three such projects, so my own tree has fallen by the wayside.
But last week, I received a photo fom England depicting six men, apparently gathered for a family function of some sort. The person who sent me the photo (a new-found second cousin once removed) doesn't know who all the men are, but he does know that one of the men (and, thankfully, which one) is his maternal great grandfather. I suspect that the grouping is three men with three sons. They are all clearly related: same receding hairline; same high cheekbones; same large noses.
So I now have a photo of my grandmother's uncle, accompanied by, presumably, other men in his family (and, by extension, other men in my grandmother's family).
Naturally, the photo has reignited my interest in my own family tree (which has been woefully neglected for far too long now).
Anyway, the arrival of that photo prompted me to pay attention to the myriad of documentation I've amassed about my lineage. The projects I've undertaken for others over the past years had helped me to develop a particularly efficient way to organize the material, and I've kept promising to put mine in that more workable arrangement.
So, I finally got to it.
And I now have five binders full of documents, entitled "Catherine Bonnie Cherryholme's Ancestry Volumes I - V ." The books contain the supporting documentation I have gathered, mostly birth (or baptism), marriage and death (or burial) certificates of my ancestors.
Genealogical research always starts with the "primary individual," and that would be me. Therefore, "Volume I -- Parents" covers me and my descendants (that would be my little chickadee and my beautiful boy) and includes my parents and all my siblings. It is chock-a-block full of documents, photos, and clippings, etc that I have collected over the years.
"Volume II -- Grandparents" (all four of them). It was particularly difficult to gather material from this point back because three of my grandparents were British Home Children. But I persevered and have managed to compile a fairly impressive collection of material. Of course, I've included a listing of the children born to each of my grandparents (my aunts and uncles) and all my cousins, etc, where I've been able to get the information. Unfortunately, not many of my cousins have been very co-operative with me on this project so I've not been able to include their descendants in this volume.
"Volume III -- Great Grandparents" I have complete birth, marriage and death certification for all but one couple. My mother's paternal grandparents are one of my brick walls. I have limited information on her paternal grandmother and have yet to prove that the couple even died, only being able to claim so because they were born in 1868 so logic tells me that they must be dead by now!
"Volume IV -- 2x Great Grandparents" -- "My Sixteen" as this group has come to be known to genealogists (I believe the phrase was first coined by Alex Hailey, whose book Roots seems to have kick-started the public's interest in genealogical research). This is the generation that most people will strive to identify when first they embark on a family history quest. I've managed to identify and fully document My Sixteen, but again, my mother's line eludes me. Naturally, if you hit a brick wall at one generation, you can't get any further back until you climb over that wall. I do, however, at least have first names for all My Sixteen and one of these days, I'll find out what Ellen's maiden name was and I'll be off to the races again!
"Volume V -- 3x and 4x and 5x Great Grandparents" -- I have documented proof of my relationship to a great many of "My 32" (3x Great Grandparents) and yes, I can actually prove my ancestry back to a few of "My 64" (4x great Grandparents) and 'My 128" (5x Great Grandparents)! (With each generation, the number of couples being researched doubles since each person in the previous generation has two parents.)
The framed picture is actually a jigsaw puzzle that I first had to assemble before I could affix labels with the names of my ancestors on the appropriate branches of the tree. It was great fun (since I love solving puzzles).
Once the puzzle was completed, I got creative and added photos. The upper left corner depicts my father as a young man along with his parents; the upper right corner is my mother along with her parents. The photo to the left of the tree trunk is my parents with all their children on the occasion of my youngest sister's wedding (one of the few times we were all gathered together). The smaller photo at the base of the tree is my little chickadee with my beautiful boy when he was two years old (the year I put the puzzle together). The ribbon extending across the bottom of the image reads "Catherine Bonnie Cherryholme."
We were able to recycle a frame I had to fit the finished product and we ended up with quite a nice presentation which now hangs over my desk.
In spite of the volume of information I have collected in my more than 25 years of pursuing this hobby, there are still several holes that I need to fill and a few brick walls that I would love to break down.
And every time I dig, I seem to find something new. In fact, I just the other day had the pleasure of adding a few new names to the tree (I actually broke through one of my smaller brick walls)!
Genealogical research truly never ends.
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