 
 As so many others out there, I have begun a quest to find the origins of my progenitors. This is not an easy task for anyone. More recently, we have begun to leave footprints in history through the use of various types of civil and religious records. Go back in time more than a couple of centuries, and all but the most notorious are lost in a void of nothingness. Unless a connection can be made to a family of royal birth or a scandalous commoner, most of us eventually fall into this nothingness. Perhaps it is exactly because of this lack of history of the average person that so many of us strive to document our families, to put the pieces of the puzzle together accurately and preserve them forever. I hated history all throughout my high school and college years. The teacher didn't exist who could inspire me to take an interest in all of those boring facts about people who were part of the past. History was a bunch of events that didn't effect me today (or so I thought) and I simply couldn't scrape up the desire to learn more than the bare minimum I needed to pass my classes. In my Senior year of high school, we had this project in American History about our "original immigrant ancestor". Now I can see how absurd a project it was, but back then I interviewed my father who had immigrated from Central America, and flipped through some genealogical research my grandmother had put together before she died. Really not much of a project or effort on my part, probably a "C" paper, if I remember correctly. But the seed had been planted even though I hadn't realized it at the time. It didn't take long before I found myself inexorably sucked into the minutest details of events I had never heard of until I found some ancestor or another who was involved in it. I have found an interest in the Civil War I never thought would ever bloom in my heart as I trace the movements of an ancestor who served in the NY 140th Volunteers. I'm desperately trying to find out more about my Loyalist ancestors who fled to Canada to escape the Revolution (What, you mean not all Americans fought the British?! That was news to me!). And I learned that the actions of the most common of men CAN affect public policy when my greatest of grandfathers caused the state of Rhode Island to draft new laws regarding common-law marriages due to his not-so-honest antics. But then, what is the use of learning about all of these events if they can't be shared with anyone who will listen? My husband is tremendously patient with me when I spout information at him about people he's never heard of before, and my mother kindly and attentively listens to tidbits about people in her family she can't keep straight because I have dug-up so many of them. It was just not enough for me. So by harnessing this new techology called "the Internet" I have now found a different outlet for my energies. Hence this site, which serves multiple purposes. One, as a way of organizing all of the worthless data I'm finding in addition to the important stuff (I think the ratio so far is about 95% useless to me in my searches, to 5% useful). Two, to get the information I'm finding out there, into cyberspace, where perhaps one day someone may run across it who may be helped by it. Three, to offer help to other genealogists by accessing resources I have available to me. Come in and bowse my pages...  Search this site: You are visitor number
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