Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Getting Started

When I was in eighth grade, I was given an assignment to start a family tree. I'd seen plenty of them and heard some family stories as a kid, but I had never paid a lot of attention to any of it. I only wish now that I had ...

That was more than a few years before the arrival of the Internet and a whole new way to trace your roots. It's been an incredible journey. The last 10 years or so have probably seen the most activity on my part. My mother worked on the BYRNES line through much of the 1980s and 1990s. Not long after 2000, she got interested in her paternal roots and we jointly started checking out the McKINNEY ancestry. It's like a huge puzzle that reveals not just one picture but many.

It also has put me in touch with lots of distant cousins. Among them, there's Rhonda in Texas (KACKLEY), Sarah in Oklahoma (McKINNEY), and very recently Cathy just a few towns away (VAUGHN/HOGG). If I'm really lucky, there will be even more along the way. Who knows -- maybe one of them will be YOU.

2 comments:

Mary said...

In my tree, Asseneth Bramblet (Mary Enceneth Vaughn), who married Benjamin Brown Bramlet, was the mother of Nathan Napoleon Bramlet who married Lula Ella Ann Guthrie Carnahan. Nathan and Lula were the parents of Elsie Marie Bramlet who was my grandmother. It was she who told me her grandmother Asseneth's name was actually Mary Enceneth Vaughn.

NV said...

I may be confused, but I think a DIFFERENT George Vaughn married Nancy Hays.

According to his will, JOSEPH VAUGHN was the father of Asseneth Bramblet. Of course, we could be talking about two different people as these families loved to name all their kids the same as their siblings, just to make it fun for all of us 150 years hence. :-)