Genealogy

 As a middle aged adult I became very interested in genealogy.  This was in fact how I learned that I had Revolutionary War ancestors which led to me applying to and becoming a member of The Daughter Of The American Revolution.  I have always been a person who values extended family relationships and I wanted to learn everything that I could about my family histories and even who my living relatives are.  A while back I decided that I wanted to leave Facebook for a number of reasons.  I realized that if I deleted my account, I would be deleting about 13 years worth of stuff that I had written and posted, so I just deactivated my account.  I know that only certain people ever become interested in genealogy, but if Facebook sticks around for the long term, there will be huge amounts of information about deceased people in their Facebook accounts.  The same is true for all the other social media sites that people use.  If my ancestors had had social media accounts that I could view and read, that would be like a treasure trove to me.  As it is now, there is a limited amount of information that can be learned about all of our ancestors who lived before the internet and World Wide Web.  Who knows what will be done with social media and blog sites in the future, but as a person interested in genealogy, I hope that people’s accounts will be preserved and be searchable (if that is their wish) once they have passed on.  Some social media sites already have settings to choose how you want your account memorialized.  I think this is great and what they should do.  I didn’t want to be on Facebook anymore, but now I have this blog site of my own where I can write much more than I ever would on a social media account and no one will ever see any of it unless they are interested and choose to visit my site.  I have not yet mentioned to anyone that it exists.  The link is just there attached to my instagram account. 😁

Ok, I got off track.  I guess the thing that I forgot to say is that  there was something about Facebook that  didI really appreciated.  When working on genealogy,  I wanted to trace all my family members including discovering who living family members are.  Facebook was an invaluable tool in figuring out these puzzles.  Yes, it required creeping the Facebook accounts of people that I don’t know, but when it comes to solving my relative puzzles, I am a shameless creep.  You can figure out a lot of family relationships and who all these people are descended from, by investigating whatever photos are available to be seen in a person’s account.  The people who most frequently comment on or like their photos are likely to be their family members.  I actually figured out who a sister of one of my great grandmothers was, starting with an Ancestry DNA cousin match and then tracing his ancestors backward to find their connection with mine.  Yes, I am a shameless family researcher.  I have never been able to find any information about who this great grandmother’s parents were, so discovering that she had a sister who also emigrated to America, was a big piece of information.  I still didn’t learn much about this great grandmother’s parents but I did learn one fact and that is that her father’s name was most likely William.  Genealogy is about following clues and figuring out whatever you can. 😙😄