Dave & Mary Ann  
 

    My story is probably similar to yours.  When I was a little girl, I wanted to know where our family came from.   My mother said we're mostly French, with just enough Scotch/Irish thrown in to make life interesting.  Forty years later, I still didn't know any more than that.  In 1996 with a long overdue family reunion on the horizon and a newly acquired computer, I was on a mission.  I started plunking in my first cousins (87 strong) to make name tags.  That modest beginning was the onset of "genealogy fever".  Two years later, I had traced most of my direct lines back to Europe.  On the quest for my French- Canadian ancestors, I have discovered direct lines from Switzerland, Ireland, and Scotland.  The biggest surprise was the Quaker line from New England.
 

 

    My husband Dave is a wonderful (tolerant) man who is along for the ride when it comes to genealogy.  Though mildly curious of his lineage, he leaves the hard-core hunting to his crazy wife, who loves to spend hours in libraries and poking around cemeteries.  But now I think I've got him hooked--at least as far as being my chauffeur, driving me all over Canada in search of our roots. After being spoiled with the wealth of French-Canadian resources, my pursuit of his Prussian and Irish family  continues to be a challenge.
 

    Our kids, Kristen and Aaron, were safely away at college and immune from the dreaded "fever" when it first hit. Now they have embarked on careers of their own. But throughout, they have been amused at the transformation of their mother from one afraid to try the internet to now tying up the phone line for hours with internet traffic. Interesting concept, a parent monopolizing the phone with teenagers in the house!

    Back to genealogy.  Now that my research has made a dent in the "where" and "when", I have become fascinated with all the "coincidences" that I've come across (like my great-grandparents didn't just "find" each other in Bay City Michigan, their families came from the same town in Quebec and immigrated here together).  Who were these people?  Why did they come to the U.S.?  Canada?  Studying the history of the times and how they lived has taken the "skeleton" of the data and made it come alive.

    Although we are fortunate to have extensive pictures dating back 100 years, unfortunately most of them were not labeled and still have not been identified.  A project for another day will be to add them to this web site for others who may be related and recognize our unnamed ancestors.  Here are a few that we have identified.

 

 

 
 
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