Climbing the Branches

I have once again begun exploring the branches of our towering family tree, which seem to go on forever. As a child I always enjoyed hearing family stories and taking time to create small family trees, complete with birth, marriage and death dates. When I became a mother my interest grew, wanting to preserve all the uniqueness of our family for my kids to enjoy and pass on to the next generation. About 15 years ago I got the Family Tree Maker program and began to meticulously plug in all my information. Once Nolan became a toddler and Atira came along, however, my free time was dramatically reduced and it was put on the back burner. This past week the genealogy itch reappeared and I sat down to the computer to find that one of my previously favorite web sites, Ancestry.com had become even better with an online tree maker and easy access to the public trees of other members, complete with scanned documents and photos that you can instantly merge with your own. I am going to need to seriously limit myself. Genealogy is not a waste of time but it certainly is a killer of it. One of the branches that I have concentrated on in the past is that of my maternal grandmother's, the Fountains of Bristol, Maine. My grandmother doesn't remember her natural father and this is his line, so I was so pleased to find, when I picked up where my research ended a few years ago, that attached to another tree was a photo of my grandmother's father, Wilton James Fountain, when he was a young boy.


I immediately emailed a copy of it to BauBau, knowing that she had never seen a photo of her dad and would be very excited to see it. The email that I received back from her was sad but brought to mind the fact that God's timing is perfect. On the day my email was opened, her younger brother, Bobby, had died. The photo had brought a bit of sunshine into an otherwise bleak and dreary day......Genealogy is definitely not a waste of time.