My Genealogy Quest

The Stories of our Ancestors past

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Ketchum

Wounds of Family History

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I decided today that I would try and write a blog about something that has been on my mind all week.  My challenge this week was going back to basics and really getting those details that may have been overlooked and making sure that I have all my source citations in place.  As I was confirming and verifying new data, I could not help but to think about my ancestors and how they endured many tribulations throughout their lives just like we all do.  It took me many years for me to understand that life is not always easy and you sometimes have to embrace and/or overcome life’s tribulations.

Growing up I always felt that I had got the short end of the stick by not being raised by either one of my parents.  Part of me buying into that was the fact that people constantly reminded me of it and would tell me that they felt sorry for me.  I took that to heart thinking that something was wrong with me and because of that I felt unworthy.  What I didn’t understand was that those things were out of my control and that as a child I am a product of what was inherited to me and that this would be my own wound that I would have to embrace and overcome in my life journey.  If you would have talked to me about this 10 years ago, I would have still been a mess and had not embraced my wound.  But, this week as I went through each and every one of my family members, everyone I know living and passed has had to deal with much adversity at some point through their lives.  Every person will carry a wound of some sort and many of us will carry the scars, but so much in life is the journey of how we heal.  I wish I could know all those stories of my ancestors and how they made it through.

So now I am pondering how do I cover the many wounds that I know of, as I am a descendant of all different types of family exploits.  How do you explain to people that you might be connected to them because of an outside relationship that someone had with another person?  I am not just talking about things that happened during slavery, but things that happened within the past 40 years.  Are there rules or a protocol in dealing with this in genealogy?  How much detail is too much to detail in telling your family history?  Should I just be a “transparent” family historian and let others draw there own conclusions?  I would love to know what others think.  Please leave your comments and suggestions below. 🙂

The 4 am blog…the start

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I started creating my website a few months ago in hopes that I would one day have this great repository of information and records for others who are also doing African American research in central Missouri, and hopefully that will be the case one day. But what I have realized is that this journey/endeavor that I am taking is exactly what it is, a journey that will take time. So I thought a great start to my blog would be to talk about what got me here on “My Genealogy Quest”.

First, I have been a lover of history since I was in elementary school. While most kids hated history class I was enthralled with it at a very young age and asked tons of questions in history class. Mr Kalbfleisch, my fifth grade teacher,was one of my favorite teachers growing up and he inspired my inquisition into everything history. I still to this day love reading and learning about world history. So the desire to know the past has all ways resonated with me.

But more personally, my genealogy quest for me is in hope to understand how my family came to be. I was not raised by my parents but with my Aunt Cathy, my fathers sister, so I was always wanting to know more about my family. My uncle Donald talked a lot about my paternal side and he really set my ground work into motion for my research. His oral history and details was right on target. He had written out our genealogy when I was in my early 20’s and I took that information and spent days in the Kansas City National Archives pulling census records. How exciting it was to get back to the 1870 census and see relatives names who were once enslaved.

So now it is 13 years later and I have dabbled here and there over these past 13 years, but I am now back fully committed to doing my family history to the fullest and breaking down the brick walls. I truly believe it is important for us all to document our family histories and have this information passed down for many generations to come. So this blog will touch on many different genealogical topics as I continue my exploration into my family’s history.

I am currently focusing on my paternal lineage which includes the following surnames: Jackson, Yancey, Keevil, Miller, Fowler, Hogan, Finley of central Missouri. For my maternal lineage, which I have only recently started to researching the following surnames: Brantley, Vann of Tulsa, Oklahoma. My maternal lineage is also linked to the Cherokee Indians of Oklahoma. I have already made a connection to this line and look forward to exploring further. I have also started researching my husbands side who is from Texas and Alabama, surnames include: Ketchum, Hooey and Stringer. I am truly looking forward to the future so that I may one day look back at my blogs to tell the story of my genealogy quest. This is just the start…..

IJK

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