Genealogy Madness!!

This week I have been taking advantage of a 14 day free trial on Ancestry.com. This stuff is so addictive! I started out just looking for some information about my husband's grandparents. We took pictures of their graves a few years ago and that got us interested in some other Rhodes graves in the same cemetery. Little did I know that would lead to an obsession with reading census records for hours at a time going all the way back to the 1800's.

There is a website which lists all the gravestones in their little cemetery in Brushy Creek, Texas, with all the information on the stones. That helped in looking through census records to find the names of other family members and how they were related. Then I started working on his grandmother. The women are much harder to trace because usually only birth records list their maiden names. Then I started looking for my ex-husband's family since they are the ancestors of my children and grandchildren. His mother's maiden name was Smith!!! Try searching for that on a census record. I knew she had a brother, but that wasn't much help either, since his name was Bill Smith.

The funny thing is, after you go back and read about people, you get more and more excited every time you find them again on the next census. I've read WWI and WWII draft registration cards and made notes about who had blue eyes and how tall they were and how much they weighed, as if there's going to be a test.

Today I got the biggest thrill since I started this. I was looking for my grandmother, Mary, in the 1900 census. I knew she was born on Feb. 14, 1900, so I wasn't sure she would be on there. Sure enough, when I found her family in the Wayne Co., WV census, there she was listed as being 3 months old. But the thrill came when I moved to the top of the page to make a note of the date of the census. There on the very first line of that page was a six year old boy named Willie Elkins. That may not mean anything to you, but I knew as soon as I saw it that I had found my grandfather!! They must have grown up a few houses from each other because the census takers went from house to house taking down the information about who lived in each household.

It makes me cry now thinking of the two of them as kids growing up. I'm sure they never dreamed back then that someday their granddaughter would read about them on a census report and be so excited she would both laugh and cry over it.

I've got to go, now. I only have a few days left to find out everything I can about Willie and Mary Ann, or else I'll have to break down and pay the annual fee!!