I never imagined catching the genealogy bug but it happened! I blame one of my cousins for contracting the condition. When my cousin Donna sent me a stack of papers that was chocked full of family details, I was a goner. I just had to know more. I think just the thought we might be related to Sequoyah was the clincher!

Then another cousin set up a family page on Facebook for my mama’s family. Suddenly we were getting posts from relatives we’d never heard about. More and more photos started appearing and my condition worsened. I was hearing from all kinds of relatives from my mama’s side but not from my daddy’s. So I set up a family page with my fraternal grandparents’ names. Family members I’d never heard about found the page and they also posted photos and bits of information from their branch of the family. Now I was completely addicted!

Genealogy Websites

So I went again to the web and put in a few names on two different websites. One of my favorites is FamilySearch.org and the other is MyHeritage. I couldn’t believe the names in my tree and with one very unusual name of a great-great-grandmother given to me by my granny before she died; my tree grew leaps and bounds. That one name, “Manerva,” brought up relatives all the way to 1623 when one of my great-great, exponentially great grandfathers came over from England to Jamestown as an indentured servant. He lived in Jamestown when Pocahontas came for her visits!

Nothing I did to follow my family roots was hard but it is time consuming. It would have taken a lot more time, but my cousins and distant relatives who had also been searching had paved the way for me. Their posts on Facebook gave me lots of clues and the relatives that had also used FamilySearch.org or MyHeritage made some of my searching a down-right cinch.

While some of the family members who post are so distant I’ve never heard of them, others are people I’ve heard my parents and grandparents talk about during most of my lifetime. It was really fun to put faces with names. The genealogy sites have information about where my deceased relatives lived while alive. I knew most of my more immediate relatives were from the same part of Oklahoma but I found that generations back some had lived in Missouri, some in Kentucky, some in Virginia and I now know that my roots go back to England, Ireland and even Germany. I no longer wonder why my daddy has an Aunt Zoo. Her real name was Missouri!

Creating Family Pages

Setting up the family pages was quite easy. I just followed the instructions Facebook gave and I went through all my contacts for any relative for that side of the family. There’s a button to “invite them” to visit your page. I posted an encouragement for everyone to let everyone else know in the family about the page. You can see my daddy’s side of the family and my momma’s side of the family.

This is an experience none of you should miss. Please let us know what you do to find your own family roots. It could help a lot of people connect with loved ones they’ve yet to meet.