Back On-Board

Well, as you can see, I took a bit of a break from genealogy.  Summer tends to do that to me.  I am always so busy with the kids in the summer.  Then, I was super busy in the Fall with them, too.  E-Ray played his first season of football and it was incredibly time consuming.  Anyways, the holidays are over and my husband just deployed, so I should have some time to get back on board.

I've decided that this time around I need to come up with some sort of plan.  I have so much information on my ancestry that it can become overwhelming at times.  I need to stick to only working on one surname at a time or it just becomes too confusing and I lose track of what I was doing.  Right now, my first goal is to get this blog exactly the way I want it.  I need to create pages for all of the primary surnames in my research and input all of the information I have thus far on them...one....at....a....time.

As far as research is concerned, I am going to focus my time on my maternal Grandmother's lineage because it is the one that is the biggest mystery.  I posted about it in my regular blog here before I began this genealogy blog.  So, you can pop on over there to read the full story, or, long story short......both of her parents died when she was very young and her and her siblings were split up and were/are not in touch with each other.  Her half brother's daughter found me via ancestry.com in 2010 and ended up sending me a portrait of my Great Great Grandmother.  It was absolutely incredible.  I came to tears when I opened up the envelope and laid eyes on the beautiful photo.

Now, my goal is to try and get in touch with my Grandmother's sister's family.  I am hoping maybe they can fill in some of the gaps in our family tree, and more than anything I am hoping that they have a photo of my Great Grandfather.  As far as my Grandmother knows, her sister, Shirley, is still alive.  For whatever reason, they are not in touch.  One of Shirley's children was in touch with my Grandmother a few years back to tell her she had had a stroke, but that's the last she heard from them.  I called her today and told her I want to try to get in touch with her sister's family.  She doesn't have any contact information and only knows the name of one of Shirley's sons.  So, I googled his name and looked for a match near where Shirley lives and I got what I hope is a pretty good match on the whitepages.com website.  It gave me an address and a phone number.  I decided to write him a letter because I think calling him on the phone would be entirely too awkward.  I am sending it off tomorrow and I sure do hope he will respond!!  I will be so incredibly excited if he does!!  Wish me luck!!