Bit­ten by the geneal­ogy bug…

In 1967 my mater­nal grand­par­ents took on the enor­mous task of research­ing their col­lec­tive fam­ily his­to­ries. With­out ben­e­fit of faxes and e-mails, geneal­ogy data­bases and forums they instead wrote count­less let­ters and spoke to rel­a­tives by telephone.

When they’d done all they could do they com­piled the names and dates, and most impor­tantly the sto­ries, on an old man­ual type­writer and pre­sented it to each of their six chil­dren. These chil­dren in turn made copies and gave them to their chil­dren, of which I was one lucky recipient.

Though very young at the time (11 or 12) I was intrigued by this mem­oir of times and peo­ple gone by. Of course the pres­sures and dis­trac­tions of being a teenager soon took over and it was sev­eral years before my inter­est rekin­dled. But the dif­fi­cul­ties of under­tak­ing genealog­i­cal research at that time were enor­mous. Would-be geneal­o­gists needed time, money and access to records, all of which were in short sup­ply por moi. So once again the fam­ily his­tory was tucked away until that mag­i­cal time when one had the means to indulge this hobby.

Then along came the inter­net and slowly but surely the genealog­i­cal com­mu­nity rec­og­nized the oppor­tu­ni­ties and advan­tages of get­ting online (there are some dis­ad­van­tages too, but I won’t go into that here). So out came the fam­ily his­tory once more — but what to do with it? Where to start? It didn’t take long to real­ize the first thing I needed to do was share my grand­par­ents mem­o­ries — it’s their work and their words that are the inspi­ra­tion for this site.

But there was more — I wanted to find out if those words could be “proved”, or at least cor­rob­o­rated by other research, and I wanted to start fill­ing in the gaps. AND… I wanted to see how much I could do online.

I’m for­tu­nate in that I have such a remark­able start­ing point and equally for­tu­nate that there are sev­eral branches of my fam­ily that are very well doc­u­mented. So this ven­ture is per­haps not a true bench­mark of trac­ing one’s roots online but it will no doubt have its chal­lenges and brick walls.

In con­clu­sion I would like to ded­i­cate this site to my grand­par­ents, Louis Switzer and Grace Mer­rill Switzer, for car­ing about their fam­ily roots, for tire­lessly uncov­er­ing them and for leav­ing those of us who’ve fol­lowed with such a pre­cious gem.

Next: Fore­word