Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Project finished!

I had written before about doing the genealogy for our friend Jim, and now it is done!  I have it in a binder, photos copied and labeled, family trees done and headstones for all I could find.  I have also compiled some of the stories that I have found, with the verified and unverified marked accordingly. 

dividers in place!

photos labeled and referenced to their page in the tree!
This was a lot of fun for me as I have really only worked on my own family.  Starting from scratch and not having any "lore" to use in the research was a new experience. 










I also found out some of the tricks that my photo programs will do that I was unaware of (thank you to the oldest son - also known as the family computer guru) so that in the future I will be able to add captions and size the images much easier than before.  I found that both Picasa and Gimp are fun to use, fairly easy to figure out and did a lot more than I thought I was capable of.






It also turned out to be fun to find the 'nuggets' in another persons tree, and I did find a few,  I am very grateful to the New England Genealogical Society for doing the ancestry charts on all the presidential candidates in the past as I was able to show that my friend is related (distantly) to Presidents Bush 41 & 43, President Obama and Governor Sarah Palin!  Who knew those 4 were related?!  I found that his ancestors lived close to Johnny Appleseed, and some of them were captured by indians and escaped.  Half of his family were here on the 5th ship to the Plymouth colony and the other half came after the Civil War.  His story turned out to be like so many - the story of America.

So Jim now knows that some of his ancestors helped build this country and some escaped to America fairly recently, I hope he enjoys knowing about their contributions and that it gives him a real sense of belonging to the bigger picture!

For my part  I learned new things and had fun and really what more could I have asked for?!