So what did suddenly inspire me into getting into genealogy in a really enthusiastic way (I could say obsessed, but I'm generally a pretty chill person and don't get obsessed by things ... but I am very very enthusiastic about family history)? It wasn't because I'm middle-aged, which is often when people get into family history. No, it was essentially because of a loss.

 My mom died.

 After her passing, it wasn't just her that I missed, but I also had the realization that with her passing, it was also a loss of family lore, of all the great family stories she had heard from her mother and other relatives. My maternal grandmother had been the keeper of the family stories, not just of her family, but also for my maternal grandfather's family. He didn't appear to care very much where he came from, but she knew the stories and kept track of all the relatives. She even told me once that she knew so much about his family because his mother late in life had cancer, and my grandmother had to drive her to chemo every week, and so they'd chat in the car to Pittsburgh and back, so she asked her mother-in-law about her background and her long-passed husband's background (I always remembered that my great-grandmother never referred to her late husband by his first name, but called him "Mr. Grace," in a very formal way). 

And my mom became the next keeper of the stories, and like her mother, my mom also knew all about my dad's background and all about his family. I always wonder if this was unique to our family, or if in other families the women were the keepers of the family stories and the family history?

But that was gone now with Mom's passing. This thought really hit me hard when we were at the house, sorting through things as my Dad prepared to downsize and sell the house (he never had liked it that much anyway, it had been a house that Mom picked out when they first "downsized," moving out of the house I grew up in in favor of a newer, BIGGER house). I was looking at all the old photo albums that my grandmother had, and our other family albums, and decided to take them. My brother, who lived out of town, didn't have much time to stick around and help sort though things, so it fell to my wife and I to help out Dad and decide what to keep and what to sell. Dad only wanted a couple albums with our photos as kids, and an album of his family's photos, and his wedding album. Everything else was either going to get tossed, or I would take them. 

I took them, and though I knew who a lot of the people in the photos were, I realized my daughter did not, and I'm not entirely sure that my brother knew who they were, and certainly his kids wouldn't, either. I had heard a lot of the family stories from Mom and Grandma, but I don't know if my brother had, because after he went off to college, he moved on and away from Cleveland, while I stayed in Cleveland, and had the chances to hear more of the stories.

But I knew then and there, that I had to do something to preserve those stories, as much as preserve those old photos, and make sure that the family members knew of our family history and where we came from. I knew this was going to take work, because I'd have to do a lot of research and try to pull together a lot of loose ends and try to solve a lot of mysteries. And I knew I also knew very little about really doing deep family research, outside of using Census records and old newspapers. But I also knew that I wanted more than just names, dates, and places. I wanted context. It wasn't enough for me to learn the city in England we came from (Bolton), but I wanted to also learn the history of Bolton, and find out what background information I could get on all sorts of aspects of my ancestors' lives. 

And it was also not just important to create a family tree, but to create a family NARRATIVE. I knew I was going to have to write this up as a story, so that I would have a "product" for my daughter to read, as well as something that my brother could read and something he could share with his kids.

So it wasn't a little thing I realized I needed to do. But I knew I had to do it, and that I was one of the only people around who COULD do it. I knew that Mom had a few cousins who had done some digging, and I hoped I could build on what they had already, but I figured that no one was going to do the context research that I was also planning, because I HAD been a historian, and that's the kind of research I had been doing during my professional and academic career. 

So what I needed to learn now was the basics of genealogical research, and learning what sources were out there to go digging into that could help me find the information I needed to construct my family history, and to also see what basic things I had to work with in terms of family papers. As we sorted through Mom's things, we actually found that my grandmother never got rid of anything, so we had a box of family documents that would be extremely helpful to my work.

And so I set to work.