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Whether you're just starting out as a genealogist or you've been researching your family lines for more years than you're quite ready to own up to, you've probably encountered your fair share of obstacles along the way. If your response to those obstacles has been to question whether you ever really wanted to know about your ancestors and to slink off with your tail between your legs, you may want to skip this page. On the other hand, if you seem to have a choice of whether to laugh or to cry about the situation and you decide (eventually) that laughter is better, this page is for you.
For the rest of you who have found your way here, enjoy! And, if you have something funny to say about genealogy and would like for me to post it here, just click on the email link near the bottom of the page and let me know. Read on, Friends!!
I want ancestors with names like Rudimentary Montagnard or Melchizenick von Steubenhoffmannschild or Spetznatz Giafortoni, not William Brown or John Hunter or Mary Abbott.
I want ancestors who could read and write, had their children baptized in recognized houses of worship, went to school, purchased land, left detailed wills (naming a huge extended family as legatees), had their photographs taken once a year -- subsequently putting said pictures in elaborate isinglass frames annotated with calligraphic inscriptions, and carved voluble and informative inscriptions in their headstones.
I want relatives who managed to bury their predecessors in established, still-extant (and indexed) cemeteries.
I want family members who wrote memoirs, who enlisted in the military as officers and who served in strategically important (and well-documented) skirmishes.
I want relatives who served as councilmen, schoolteachers, county clerks and town historians.
I want relatives who `religiously' wrote in the family Bible, journalizing every little event and detailing the familial relationship of every visitor.
In the case of immigrant progenitors, I want them to have arrived only in those years wherein passenger lists were indexed by National Archives, and I want them to have applied for citizenship, and to have done so only in those jurisdictions which have since established indices.
I want relatives who were patriotic and clubby, who joined every patrimonial society they could find, who kept diaries, and listed all their addresses, who had paintings made of their houses, and who dated every piece of paper they touched.
I want forebears who were wealthy enough to afford, and to keep for generations, the tribal homestead, and who left all the aforementioned pictures and diaries and journals intact in the library. But most of all, I want relatives I can FIND!!!
--I originally took this from the GenHumor Mailing List. No other source was given. I have recently been contacted by the author and am pleased to be able to give her credit for her delightful article.
The author is Barbara A. Brown. Her work was copyrighted in the August 1998 issue of the IIGS Newsletter, which can be accessed at:
BOGGLERSThis is a fun new item I recently discovered. Guess what the message in the box says; then just click on "The Answer" to see if you're correct. Enjoy!
GIVING CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
The graphics on this page are the creation of Meilin Wong. This and many other beautiful graphic designs can be seen at Fantasyland Graphics. Just click on the button below to go there.
DISCLAIMER: I make no claim of authorship to any of the "funnies" displayed here. When I first decided to add a humor page, I expended quite a bit of time and effort trying to track down the original authors so that I could obtain permission to reprint the material. Inevitably, the results were the same: the items had been passed from person to person and from mailing list to mailing list until no one had any idea any longer where the pieces originated. If you see some of your own work here and want me to remove it from public display, I will do so if you will send me an e-mail to that effect.
