Sunday, November 15, 2009

Jumping In, Feet First

Seems like with blogging, just as in life, sometimes the best way to learn something is to just jump in and hope to learn to swim. So here I go. Actually I started out helping my husband get started on his blog after taking a class at school on Wordpress. He is loving it. See his family history blog at holtdale. My motivation for writing a family history blog is at least two-fold. One, I noticed that my mother, Alma Josephine Bond, was listed on at list six genealogies online, and only one person of those six (me) actually knew her. As with so many women in genealogy, their stories are largely untold. I'd like for people to know more about her. Two, my parents died when my children were young, eight and five years old, so Ted and Amy don't really have memories of their grandparents. They'd like to know more.

I guess there is another reason too. I grew up not knowing my Hawk relatives so genealogy has been for me a process of learning about all those people I never knew. Many folks have issues with family, but there are many losses when members decide not to have contact with each other. I've been told I look a lot like my Aunt Edith. I don't know since I've never seen a photo of her.

I grew up on the family farm in South Texas, where our house burned when I was a child. It was an old farmhouse built by my Hawk grandparents after they moved from Phillips County, Kansas (1908). My mother always said the biggest loss was all those family photos. They have been largely unrecoverable. People I've met through genealogy have shared some family photos, and my close family cousins on my Bond side have shared photos. But, I remember trunks of photos upstairs in the old farmhouse attic. As a little girl I wanted to pull those trunks out and sift through all those photos. Do I ever wish I had them now!