My Mom, Margaret Rogers nee Elmore, was my best friend and my Genealogy Professor for the past 30 years. If there was anyone who knew how to investigate a Family Tree, it was she. May she Rest In Peace. Thanx, Mom.
My name is Anita Harrison nee Rogers. I began learning about Genealogy when I was about 10 years old. My parents, William and Margaret Rogers, began working on our Family Tree in approximately 1975 and would travel the country crawling through courthouse basement records, church records and marching their way through cemeteries to discover the hidden records of our family.
When I was old enough to start asking questions, they included my sister, Rhonda Messina nee Rogers, and myself in turning page by page through books, printouts and manuscripts with multi-colored highlighters and page tabs looking for surnames related to us.
My parents would then take these same books and start their investigation of the information we found for them. We continued in this manner for many years even after I moved on with my own family. Whenever we visited it was talking with Mom and Dad while going through books, listening to Mom and Dad explain new information they had found, what "Melugen" meant, the Roanoke Lost Colony and how we had been traced to Royalty in 6 different countries.
The availability of the internet in their home changed the way Genealogy was done forever. Now it was a mix of hours on the internet while comparing information in the books they owned, CD's they had bought from World Family Tree and millions of online conversations on Genealogy message boards.
In 2000, I made the leap into investigating my husband's Family Tree on my own. My parents had already done mine back about 1200 years at this point, so the other half of my children's ancestry was yet to be discovered. My father was very ill and had stopped doing genealogy; we lost him a year later. What I would give to have included my father in my own search, yet I took all the information he taught through the years and threw myself into my first Genealogy project.
I put in hours, days and months of work, connected with some of my husband's family online from his paternal side and started making the links. When I would hit a wall I could not bust through, it was my Mom I called. In time, this became the normal and we shared my files to her computer making it a joint project.
One day, Mom called me and said, "We can't work on his family anymore." A simple statement and my heart dropped; my family tree hunt for my children was over. The night before, my amazing Mother had made the connection we never thought of. My husband's tree and my tree became one; a common ancestor. We were now cousins, my children were my cousins and cousins to one another. Strange at first, then laughable, then the remembrance that we are all related if we follow our family back far enough.
Of course, the hunt is never over as a common ancestor on one family line still leaves multiple lines to discover and investigate. The search continued and still continues.
I lost Mom in August of 2010. My best friend, my confidant, my Mom was gone. I had been prompting her for years to become a Certified Genealogist and she always had a reason not to. It was a love of hers, a passion, an addiction that she passed on to me and I hope to pass on to one of my children. Now I go it alone and take their vast knowledge with me in my journeys through the plethora of information to solve the puzzles of others. I can't thank my parents enough for discovering who I am and helping to mold me into who I am.
I will continue my Genealogy history in my blog as there is much to say over the last 13 years of a never ending passion for the investigation, discovery and linking the puzzle of friends who wanted their own history revealed.