So there we were at the Christmas table with our friends who also had no family coming by for the holidays - our orphans group. Our friend Jim mentioned in the course of the conversation that he didn't even know the name of his grandparents on either side of his family. I was of course understandably horrified! (smile) I grew up knowing the 3 past generations and hearing the stories of others so it is a foreign concept to me. He said he would like to know something about them if only their names, so I volunteered! I figured there would not be much, sounded like a small family and ....you know the rest of course. He has a huge family and I was making painstaking progress and then I got back to a point and he has relatives of famous people and I was able to add a whole section that would have taken me a really long time on my own to find. I have now traced all his family lines back to the first immigrant to America and will begin to put them together.
And it occurs to me that to give a report to some one that is not immersed in this like I am I need to be careful, I need to watch that I don't use abbreviations that are obscure, that I don't make references that are unknown to the general public (when I first got interested I had no idea what a GEDCOM file was, and had a hard time finding it!) and that the "tree" format that I use is easy to understand and follow. Makes me realize how much 'jargon' I have fallen into.
Ah well, learning new tricks means I'm not an old dog yet?
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