When I was preparing to marry my first husband (Chuck’s the third. Keep up.) My mother gave me a fill-in-the-blank family tree book.

And I started asking questions.

And, just so you know, people will absolutely tell you some shit if you’re being nosey in the interest of a family tree. It’s like they forget you are their relative and not someone from 60 Minutes.

So, filling in the blanks was fun and then I ran out of pages as grandmothers and great-aunts spilled the tea. And then I learned that there was a Church of Latter-Day Saints down the road from me and they had a library just for that interest. All they asked was that you share your info. And I found cousins who had already been looking things up and they would share.

Notebooks happened. Sheets to record multiple generations got filled in. Then, there was a computer and software to hold it all.

There were some great stories in all of that and it put a lot of 400 years of history into some context for me. There were brothers who took opposing sides in the Civil War, a cousin who was raised by her aunt and uncle because her mother died of a botched abortion, an ancestor who was killed in an Indian raid. I have learned when people decided to come here and how much of their family came with them and where they wandered until they found the place they wanted to stay. I have learned who were slave owners, soldiers or scalawags.

This was followed by a hard drive crash that put me off adding to any of it for a very long time.

Then the Mormons created Ancestry.com and I could store all my info in the cloud. Much safer than a local computer that I could kill by accident.

So, I started filling in those blanks. And Ancesty helps you. It lets you see pages of censuses and copies of public records. It lets you compare notes with other people investigating the same families you are looking at. You can share pictures and documents. It’s very handy.

I don’t mind sharing what info I have with anyone. It’s always reciprocal. I will admit that the first time I saw that a pair of my Church of England ancestors had been sealed in the Mormon church by some distant cousin, I was both appalled and amused. But, I figure that if they mind, they can haunt the culprit all they care to.

I have been using 3 different trees to kind of keep things tidy. One for the paternal family of my child, one for me and one for my present husband. I recently decided to dump it all into one huge tree and, once I did that, I have been doing some tidying up.

I have sometimes accepted what people have shared from their own trees without double checking everything. And because there have been some overlaps, I have some duplicates that need merging. So, I’ve been using the List feature and going through the names alphabetically, checking for duplicates and verifying info as I go. I got into the Ds last night.

The How-you’re-related feature has been pretty entertaining. I am very distantly related to Chuck’s brother-in-law via my first husband. and Chuck is his 6th cousin once removed.