Instructions are as follows:
Read Brenda Joyce Jerome's post Who or What Do You Blame? on the Western Kentucky Genealogy blog. She asks these questions:
- Can you identify person or event that started you on this search for family information?
- Did you pick up researching where a relative had left off?
- Did your interest stem from your child's school project on genealogy?
- If you have been researching many years, it may be hard to pinpoint one reason for this journey.
My response to the first question has to be my mother, who passed along all the stories handed down from my maternal grandmother, coupled with my own curiosity.
No, I did not pick up where a relative left off. There were the stories handed down but no one had actually started documenting our family history when I began in the late 1980s to look for my ancestors.
My interest steamed from my own curiosity about my ancestors and also the mini-series, Roots, which aired during my sophomore / junior year (1977) in high school and by Roots: The Next Generations, which aired during my senior year in high school (1979). However, I didn't really get started on actually attempting to research my family until the late 1980s. To this day I still remember the excitement of my first genealogical find, my grandfather's, Oscar Lucillous "LC" Hosch, WWI draft registration card and realizing that although he was reared in Walton County, GA, he was actually born in Jackson County, GA. Back then, I used snail mail to obtain a copy of granddad's registration card. With the exception of taking a 10 year break between 1999 and 2009, I've been researching ever since.
Thank you mom for instilling in me the desire to know our history because as you always told me Everybody has a right to know from whence they came.
And also, once again, thanking Cousin Nicholas, for motivating me to return to my research.
I've enjoyed reading how everyone got started in genealogy with this "Saturday night fun". Its a bit of serendipity that you and I were both influenced by "Roots", even though I read it a few years earlier (around 1975 or 1976 during the bicentenniel) It appears that we both graduated High School the same year- 1979!
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