Year End Note

Several thousand people later - you know, those girls I hadn't flushed out - I'm back! 

I am nearing the end of the Nova Scotian Vincent line, that is the descendants of  George Vincent & Mary Higgins and excited to move onto Charles' siblings, starting with John Vincent of 1707!

In George's line, I have discovered jewelers, gold diggers (yes, dug for gold in the Yukon not the marrying kind - well, some of those too!), criminals, dairy farmers, letter carriers, miners, insurance agents, real estate agents, bankers, railroad clerks and so much more!

Although a great many of those descendants remained in the Maritimes, I was struck by the sheer number of descendants who emigrated back to the homeland - the United States. 

I have written about some of them but the diversity will make for many great entries in the New Year....

For now...

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

A Calling

Genealogy is a difficult hobby to explain and certainly one that results in the 'glazed eye' for the disinterested but this passage written by a Catherine (Clemens) Seveanu in Sep 2009 sums it up succinctly!

 

A CALLING:
What calls us to find the ancestors? It goes beyond a simple curiosity. We are taken over, compelled, as if possessed by something bigger than us that is begging to be revealed. There is one of us in most every family, called to be the scribe. I am but one of the many in the long line of storytellers of our clan. Like others I am called to gather and assemble the ancestors—to breathe life back into them as far back as we can reach. We take what we find and chronicle the facts of their existence, remembering their names and who they were and what they did. They are the sum of who we are, for without them, we would not exist. We greet those who came before us, restoring their place in the familial line. We scribe their stories and their histories. We search for them in public libraries, county records, and weed-filled or well-kept cemeteries. We comb through yellowed newspapers, family archives, and lovely old letters and photo albums. We find them! And in finding them—we find ourselves.