Every so often, Craig and I go through periods of frenetic interest in genealogy. We're blessed with family members who have done much of the grunt work already, and have extensive trees on both sides. Every so often, we poke around the internet, find some new leads, and thank our lucky stars that we aren't doing all of this by mail.
Somehow, we became the keepers of all the Schwarzkopf/Black information that Ellen's mom had compiled over the years (by mail and microfiche). It's fascinating stuff, full of family stories, maps, and pictures. The chap up above is Ellen's great-great grandfather, William W. Black. He lied about his age in order to join the Union army as a drummer boy when he was fourteen. In our latest genealogy surge, we found out that Craig narrowly missed being his own 10th cousin 15 time removed (or something), as Cecilia Freeman was a popular name in 17th century England. Ellen is, however, distantly related to the Blue Fugates of rural Kentucky, who intermarried enough that many of their children and descendents had a rare blood disorder that made their skin look blue. Her branch of Fugates split off before that, but I think we'll caution our kids about marrying their cousins all the same.
My long-term goal is to compile a family history scrapbook that presents these photos and bits of history in an attractive manner. That, and more serious research, are a "someday" plan. We took the first step toward it by going through the big boxes of Schwarzkopf and Black information and the Freeman stuff that keeps getting added to it. Everything that wasn't needed got pitched, and the items we wanted to keep were filed by person.
So, we went from this:
To this:
Not too shabby, eh? (On a closer look, I see that the sorting has already started in the "before" picture.) Now we have a relatively contained, relatively attractive box, rather than just any old Land's End box. (Thanks to leftover fabric, it coordinates attractively with our decor - essential, you know.) And if we want to find Emma Faulkner Loehr's remembrances of her father, we know just where to look.
