Welcome to my new blog for researching my family genealogy. I have been a family genealogist for over 35 years, a hobby that I have found to be enjoyable, exciting and also frustrating at times. I have been contemplating on how to publish my research and decided that a blog might work best for now. I also do digital scrapbooking and have started to combine the two.
So I started this blog by first deciding on a name. Unfortunately, the name I settled on was already taken by someone who started a blog eight months ago and never posted a single post. Ditto my second and third choices of names. Do people just set up blogs with all the cool names just in case they want it at some time? Blogger should have a rule: if you don’t post your first post within a specified amount of time after creating your blog, it is automatically deleted.
So let’s talk about names. Names are very important. Whether you want that perfect name for your family history blog or naming your first born child, it can be a wonderful choice or a dismal failure. Names can range from creative and imaginative to “You named your kid what?”
The right name can define the very essence of a living being. Does anybody remember Johnny Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue”? Imagine giving your son a name he has to fight his entire life to defend. I went to school with a girl with the unlikely name of Gregory (she was named after a nun). I thought it was a very cool and unusual name, but the school was always trying to put her into the boy’s PE class. Not so cool.
Over the years, names have come and gone. Most names have a certain period of history you can point to. How many Prudence, Matilda or Millicents are there around now? The hippie 60’s we had Moon Zappa, Free Carradine, and Kiefer Sutherland.
But the hardest part in genealogy is differentiating between all the sons who have the same names as their fathers, grandfathers and uncles. I have one line, the Applegates, who have a ton of George’s. And keeping them all straight can be very confusing.
This is a journey of my family roots. Pull up a chair and sit a spell.
