by Sherry Stocking Kline
October 19, 2009

Randy Seaver of GeneaMusings issued this challenge on Saturday night!  I’m a bit late, but I don’t want to miss out on all the fun, so here goes!

Hey geneaphiles – it’s Saturday Night, time for more Genealogy Fun for all Genea-Musing readers.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (and we need more of you to do this, otherwise it may end…), is to:

1)  Read Brenda Joyce Jerome’s post Who or What Do You Blame? on the Western Kentucky Genealogy blog.  She asks these questions:

*  Can you identify person or event that started you on this search for family information?

*  Did you pick up researching where a relative had left off?

*  Did your interest stem from your child’s school project on genealogy?

*  If you have been researching many years, it may be hard to pinpoint one reason for this journey.

2)  Write your responses on your own blog, in a comment to this blog post, or in a note or comment on Facebook.

Maybe I was always a little interested in family history, but after Hobart Stocking, a professor from Oklahoma researched, wrote, and published the Stocking Ancestry, I became more interested, and shared the information with my husband’s family.  And that’s when my father-in-law, Melvin Kline, stated that he wished someone would research their family tree.

And He Kind of Hoped They Wouldn’t, Too…

And, he said, he kind of hoped maybe they wouldn’t, too.  He said that he was afraid of “what we might find.”

The story that he had always heard went like this, “three brothers came west, fought along the way, and never corresponded again.”

And because there wasn’t any correspondence between Pop’s family, and his grandfather’s family, at least that he knew of, he believed the story to be true, and he was afraid that we’d find out that his grandfather might have been the the person who caused the problem.

But still, he really wanted to know.

Who could possibly resist a puzzle or a challenge like this?

Not me, for sure, so I took up the quest and along the way became  ‘hooked’ on genealogy and preserving family history.

I was woefully ignorant of how to get started, so it was quite a long time before I learned about at least one ‘family feud’, learned where the family had migrated to Kansas from, and ‘met up’ with some distant cousins.

Unfortunately, by that time, my father-in-law had passed on, and I really wish he were here so that I could say “Thank you” to him for starting me on such a fun and addictive hobby/pastime/obsession.

But I’d like to think that somehow, he knows.