Saturday, August 21, 2010

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Wild and Crazy Genealogist?

It's Saturday Night -- time for lots more Genealogy Fun!!! Hey there, geneabloggers and musings-readers, come on down!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, comes from a post by Lynn Palermo on The Armchair Genealogist blog titled Monday Madness - The Craziest Thing You've Done in the Name of Genealogy?

* What is the most wild, crazy, off-the-wall, or really stupid thing you have done in pursuit of your ancestral families and their family history?

* Tell us about it in your own blog post, a comment to this post, or a comment or status on Facebook.

Here's mine:

Like Lynn, I'm a pretty methodical person. I don't do dangerous or criminal things on a whim (well, um, there were times when I was younger and drank more than I should have). I am also a fairly shy person - I don't like striking up conversations or meeting people I don't know, although that was worse when I was younger.

I started doing genealogy research in 1988, and had found quite a bit of information about my Seaver and Richmond lines in New England, although I couldn't figure out where the Richmonds came from in England. My brother and I traveled to Massachusetts in August 1990 to attend our uncle's 50th wedding anniversary, and I was able to talk to a number of the aunts, uncles and cousins about the Richmond family down in the Killingly CT area.

We had a free day, so my brother and I took off from Salem NH for Killingly, and stopped at a motel in Putnam CT, the town just north of Killingly. We had dinner, noticed a graveyard right next to the motel, and decided to cold call the Richmond people in the phone book. We hit gold on the second call - second cousins of ours with some family information. Russell was deaf, so we talked to his wife, and arranged for Russell to meet us at the Grove Street Cemetery right next to the motel. He came at the appointed hour, and showed us the graves in the cemetery. We hoped that he would take us out to their home and show some of the family treasures with us. He did, and we had a splendid time talking about the Richmond family line. We gathered some of the papers and photos up and went down to a local drugstore to copy them. Linda and I stopped by to see Russell and Helen several times since then, and Russell died several years ago.

I'm sure that many of my readers have been more adventurous and outgoing than I have been in my genealogical pursuits!

That's not too wild and crazy,

1 comment:

Carol said...

I'm in, part 1 of my story is here:

http://www.reflectionsfromthefence.com/2010/08/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-wild-and.html

Part 2 will appear tomorrow morning!

Thanks for the great prompt.