I have been busy this past week looking up family and tracing my roots. A person can get lost in the search. One name leads to another and another and so on. What a treasure to find some of these people. It is so very good to know where we came from and the kind of people from all walks of life. Early on, so many farmers, mechanics, soldiers, doctors, carpenters and being able to read through a lot of old letters from before 1900 that I consider myself very fortunate to have. Using websites like

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/
http://www.genealogy.com/
http://www.ancestry.com/
http://www.findagrave.com/
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~hallhistory/mchenry_county_history.htm

Just mind blowing if anyone is interested in the history of family or the community we grew up in.

Finding old pictures and documents to let us know what a family had to do to survive. Just looking at the diversity of origins of who they were, going back to Germany, Ireland, France, England and that's just scratching the surface. I have added almost two thousand names to my family tree, covering  a time span from the 17th century to the present, including the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Spanish American War, the Civil War,WWI and WWII.