Welcome

I have been working on my family tree as well as my husband's for over a year.  My father had begun tracing his family (Brennan-Shaw) and my mother's (Mueller-Schulien) and shortly after his death I picked up his files and began exploring.  To say that I have been amazed, schocked, delighted, and thrilled would be understating it.  I have definitely caught the genealogy bug and I believe there is no cure.

I have decided to start this blog to keep my family and my husband's (Terich-Ruby) family informed about what I have found.  Since I have been working on these trees nearly every day for over a year, there will be many posts to help everyone catch up. 

Today, however, I am going to write about something I discovered just yesterday. 

Most family researchers will tell you they periodically hit brick walls and that has certainly been true for me.  When I find myself stumped, I usually go to a different line within the tree, and leave the brick wall for a while.  Then I come back later to see if there are any new records on line or if there is some path I have overlooked. 

I had not visited the Brennan tree in a while because I seemed unable to find anything new, and instead I had been focusing on the Eterovic line in my husband's family.  (More on that later.)  So I decided to return to the Brennans and found two new paths of discovery.  The first was the daily newspaper of the town where my parents and I were born: Lima, Ohio.  I had discovered earlier that every issue of the paper was on line, but in the last few days, I began searching obituaries and marriage announcements that gave me the names of new relatives.  So I have been able to add many cousins to the tree. 

Then I found military records, specifically the WW I and WWII  draft cards and enlistment records of many ancestors. The draft cards gave me both information and insight into the lives of these men.  First, I was able to confirm some birthdates, which were listed.  After that, I looked in the sections that listed marital status and occupation. In the WW II records, a good number of these men were unemployed and unmarried, even at the ages of 40 and 50.  I found this puzzling at first until I realized this could very well have been the result of the Great Depression.  It was, after all, only WW II that finally pulled us out of the long term effects of the Depression and restored full employment. 

I got tears in my eyes thinking of these men who not only couldn't get a job, but probably couldn't marry as they had no means to support a wife and family.  I thought of how sad and lonely they must have been, and wondered how many of them actually went off to war willingly as there was nothing to keep them here. I thought of their poor mothers, watching them go and I felt gratitude that my own father, though drafted during the war, was able to avoid combat and serve one year in Japan after the war. 

So that's one small sample of what you can learn from genealogy other than names and dates.  I hope you will join me in this journey of discovery as I do what many others have started to do -- turn family mysteries into family history.