Today I was faced with the choice of starting a genealogy blog on Blogger with the rest of my blogs are continuing this journal/blog. I have decided to continue this journal/blog.

First, even though I haven\'t been writing here doesn\'t mean I haven\'t been working on several trees, some family trees and some non-family trees. I was lucky enough to have gotten the entire summer off to recuperate from a hip replacement which meant I spend a lot of time in front of my computer. There are a lot of things I do when I am engaging in my favorite obsession and while some of them may not seem connected at all to research, in my strange old head they do connect.

One of the things I do is volunteer work, both online and offline. My online volunteer work consists of indexing historical documents for the Family Search site (), run by the Latter Day Saints. This is not my religion but I admire them for their work in helping people find their long lost ancestors. Their spiritual belief is that everyone will be reunited one day with all their ancestors, therefore finding them and knowing them is a good thing to do. What happens while I am indexing names of folks I have not connection to at all, I get ideas of what to search for to try and break down brick walls. My tip here is - always keep a paper and pen nearby so you can jot down any ideas you come up with while you are on the computer. My job actually is an overnight job where I work along all night with lots of think time. I have been known to write down any number of thoughts that cross my mind about my ancestors during the night.

My other volunteer endeavor is that of taking volunteer photos of ancestors for folks who live out of the area which I am now able to do. I haven\'t been able to do much cemetery work up until the last month or so but it does feel wonderful to be back walking the cemeteries. This I do through Find a Grave () and have found absolute joy in walking through the cemeteries I visit and communing with those who have passed. I do not always find who I am looking for but I always find those who want to be found and remembered. My most recent cemetery project has been to photo any and all children I might find in my wanderings. I do this because it is so easy for them to be lost to time simply because they were on this earth for so short a time, \'Planted on earth to bloom in heaven.\' Author Unknown.