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John Hilyard Family ca. 1909

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

My Triumphant Return

Well, it only took six years, Pa.

In the summer of 2008, I was 37 and pregnant with my first child. My father came over to help me pack up my craft and hobby room to convert it into a nursery. As we carefully packed and labelled boxes with "Genealogy Stuff" my father quipped, "You can open these in about 18 years."  We had a chuckle over that.

Fast forward to November 2014. I decided last week it was time to return to my beloved hobby. I've been interested in genealogy since age 10, and fairly serious about it since my early 20s. I've been a Family Tree Maker fan since, well, let's just say the floppy disc days? My last iteration was FTM 2010. I figured there must be an update, so that's where I started. I downloaded the 2014 version, and was off and running.

Whoa. What happened in the last six years? 

In the last week, I have discovered genealogy podcasts and blogs. There's something called Evernote that I MUST learn about. Ancestry.com has expanded by leaps and bounds. I found a few pictures of family I didn't even know existed. Not just the pictures existance, but the family.  All this in just a brief time online.

I know I want to blog about my return to genealogy. I want to do it right. But I want to get started now while this is all fresh on my mind. This post is called My Triumphant Return with tongue in cheek. I feel like Rip Van Winkle; so much has changed that I don't even know exactly what I have to catch up on. I thought I was a pretty effective researcher before my hiatus. In some respects, it's back to Genealogy 101 for me. 

Blogger forced me to pick a title for my blog when I hadn't given it any thought yet. I figured I'll be doing this in my precious spare time, which is mostly the late evenings. But at least, I didn't have to wait the whole 18 years.

5 comments:

  1. Glad to hear you are jumping back in!

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  2. It's Bronson here. Way to go, Cuz! Find our immigrant Hilyard/Hilgert ancestor! Find photos of Thomas, John and David Hilyard, our Civil War vet ancestors! Let's find out about the women Hilyards and their lines. Let me know how I can help -- I'll be in DC for a conference on Dec. 4-5-6 and can visit the National Archives.

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  3. Welcome to the wonderful world of geneablogging. I look forward to reading more.

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  4. Your blog looks great! Don't forget to try familysearch.org as well. They have changed a lot in the last few years but you will find lots of documents there as well as on ancestry and fold3 which used to be called footnote.

    Good luck in your ancestor hunt!

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  5. Glad to hear you are back. I have been dabbling in my family history a bit more since I retired 8 years ago. Nothing quite so serious as what you have done. So happy you are back.

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