I tend to be candid about topics that others may consider sensitive. So, browse this website at your own risk.
I am an amateur genealogist with a technical background who once thought that genealogical research was something only old people did. I also thought it was boring. It turns out that it can be interesting and it isn’t as difficult to perform as you’d think since there are numerous resources (free and paid) available on the Internet.
You also don’t need much special training to be successful. I initially learned research methods from another WikiTree user in an email. You learn more techniques as you go and you can always go back to refine or correct your results.
There are multiple ways to approach genealogy research. I treat it like solving a puzzle. I follow clues (records) to find parents, partners, and children. Sometimes it’s not simple, especially when you’re black and your ancestors are from the southern US, but when you finally find another piece of the puzzle the feeling is wonderful.
Another way to approach genealogy research is to tell a story. This is something that often ends up low on my priority list, mostly because creating a detailed bio would slow down my work to add more African-Americans to WikiTree for the monthly US Black Heritage Connecting Challenge. The second reason is that most people were ordinary, so creating a bio that isn’t a narrative version of birth, census records, marriage dates, and death info would be difficult. A friend (Hina: Instagram/@hinaquiqui) encouraged me to try, however, and thus this blog was born. The stories I write will eventually be added to the appropriate WikiTree profile, of course.
The WikiTree widget (in the right sidebar on on large screens and below my bio on small ones) will take you to my WikiTree profile page and also to my family tree. I also have an account on genealysis.social that I might also use sometime.
