Time has slipped away from me again.  If you asked me when was the last time I blogged, I’d tell you I probably missed one day, not three.  I’m sorry that I haven’t been on top of this, but then again, I haven’t been in my craft room either.  I’ve really been obsessed with Ancestry.com and working on my family tree.  I had made the tree several years ago, and had a lot of dead ends.  But since then, so many new people have joined, and really put the work into 1500-1700’s, which is where my dead ends occurred.  I’ve got one branch of my tree to go all the way back to the 600’s AD in Norway, and probably could have gone a lot further with it, but I was more interested in where the other legs of my tree would take me.  I anticipated a lot of England, and that’s what I’ve been finding.   It’s fun when you find things like a family member who went to Oxford in the 1500’s.  That’s pretty cool.  I also found some family members from my DNA chain..They said I was second cousins with these people, so I sent them an email (if they didn’t have a family tree, and gave them my parents and grandparents’ names, to determine how I’m related to them.  Two of these women have gotten back to me and one talked about my grandmother and how much she loved watching her cook, and that this lady still makes turkey like my grandmother did.  She would put the turkey in a brown paper bag.  And that’s all I remember about it, the brown paper bag.  I think I’ll be asking her to give me the specifics on how grandma made the turkey, as I was too young to remember when she stopped cooking for the family.

I think I’m really interested in my family tree because the family I grew up with was very small.  My father had one sister and my mother was an only child.  So I have a grand total of three cousins, and my sister and her family, that are still alive.  It’s not a very large group, that’s for sure.  Once you look at your family tree, and realize how big it gets and how far around the world it spreads, it can get to be addictive.

I guess I’m amazed at the accuracy of the DNA results, and how they found my second and third cousins and beyond.  I wasn’t really interested in 4th – 6th cousins, as they wouldn’t have anything in common with me, since there’s no way they would remember my grandmothers or grandfathers.  I wanted to interact with people who could tell me stories that I’d never heard about my family.  Maybe I’m being too shortsighted, but I am more interested in the stories than in the connection.

As for my craft room, I promise that I’ll head there and make some cards this afternoon.  I think I need to let my family tree go for a few hours and head back to the craft room.  After all, the family tree will still be there tomorrow.

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