My love for genealogy

I started 'doing genealogy' in September of 1997. It took me 5 years to get up enough nerve to go through my mother’s personal papers after her death in 1992.

Two of my best friends had urged me to get into genealogy (they had been in it for over 20 years themselves) and I had always just turned a deaf ear. What did I care about people I had never met, would never meet and certainly I was not ‘smart’ enough to do research? In my mom’s papers was a letter from my daddy’s youngest brother giving information about their parents and all the siblings researched by a grand daughter of my grandfather’s oldest sister. Names, dates of birth and death and spouses. Ok, I thought, I’ll go to the website (the internet had just been unfolding about this time) and see if I could find one person’s information. I went to the site, typed in my great grand mother’s father’s name since, to me, it was an odd name and up on my screen came not only his name, but the whole family! This was MY family! My DNA! I was hooked!

2. Besides the above, I have to say just about every connection I find is the most exciting event/find for me. I have two main ladies who are my main interest: Two of my great great grandmother’s, Nancy Malinda Nichols and Louise Remshart.

a. Nancy Malinda Nichols who married Jacob B. Ivester. I was the first person in my branch of the family since Jacob was captured at Gettysburg to know what happened to him and where the rest of the family that was lost was….HERE in the panhandle of Texas. Eventually through this, I ‘met’ RaNelle who is a descendant of Nancy Malinda’s brother and she sent me photos of our Nichols family. The photo of Nancy’s uncle, Andrew J. Nichols, the merchant was almost exactly what a photo of my daddy looked like! THIS is the family who some of us looked like! I belonged.

Finding out through research that my great great grandmother, Nancy Malinda Nichols was NOT a floozie who abandoned her children as previously been thought. She did NOT abandon her children as ‘babies’ and run off to Texas. She didn’t leave Habersham County until about 1885, which made her children all about grown by then. Grandma Nix, as she has been to our family, was a much loved and respected woman by this family here in Texas. I’ve yet to find a photo of her, but I’m still looking for one.

b. Louise Remshart who married Thomas Oscar Watkins. My mother inherited three oil paintings that her maternal grandmother, Louise Remshart had painted before her early death. I inherited one of these paintings. Through this painting, I felt a connection to an artistic side of me...that my artistic abilities were passed down to me through her. Finding that as far back as I can find, and in my currently living family, we are all artists/craftperson’s of some sort. Our brains are connected to our hands.

Meeting and corresponding with other family members and seeing how we have common traits is such a joy to me. I’d have to say there are over 100 people I’ve corresponded with over the years who each one has something in common with me at the very least.

In every family I research, it absolutely excites and blows me away that MY family have had almost every generation have had men in the military and in service to our country! All that history that I thought was boring when I was a child was MY family! MY family played a part in the forming of this country.

If we ever can go back in time….I want to slap some of the enumerators of census records.