What's so great about genealogy?

For me, it's all about the challenge.  I'm a law librarian by trade, daughter of a journalist, and I love the challenge of trying to find an obscure fact and back that fact up with as much corroborating evidence as possible. 


It's a bit of a scavenger hunt.  A bit like trying to put together a puzzle without the picture on the box.  And when the pieces fit together, when the next fact in the chain is found and put into place, a fact that no one knew before... that is a great thrill!  OK, it's a geeky thrill, but it's a thrill.  The struggle to find a new approach, a new technique, a new source, to break through a barrier and push the tree back or forward another generation, is very exciting.

It doesn't have to be my own family, though that's where I've focused most of my research.  With my own family, I know enough of the details to narrow my focus, and to know when I have a "hit."  With other people's families, it's a lot harder, particularly putting together the first few links of the chain.  Several of my co-workers and colleagues have asked for my help, knowing that I have subscriptions to many of the online genealogy services.  I do what I can, finding a census record here, a birth record there, and so forth. 

One of my coworkers asked me if I could find anything about her grandfather.  His surname was Stern, and she thought he might be Jewish, his father perhaps an immigrant from Germany.  She gave me enough details to get started, and by the end of the day I had found census records for each decade back to 1850, and then a book about the family -- not Jewish, but Quaker, and not recent immigrants, but living on this continent before the United States won its independence.  In fact, the street where our office is located is named after one of her distant ancestors. 

And yes, I am so much of a genealogy geek that last year I gave a friend of mine a copy of her 2nd-great-grandparents' marriage certificate as a birthday present.  How's that for a present, the names of four new ancestors she did not know?  And two of those names shed light on the significance of other names in the family.

Working other people's family trees helps me get past the frustration of roadblocks on my own family tree.  Sometimes, when working another person's tree, I discover a trick, a resource, an idea that helps me further my own research.

Of course, it's hard to keep that level of enthusiasm going all the time.  I've been working on this genealogy for about 15 years now, on and off.  I would work on it for a few months, hit a roadblock, put it down for a while, pick it up a few months or a year later.  But in the last year, I've picked up momentum for a rather silly reason: one of my co-workers is a very distant cousin.  Seeing the family name pop up in the office a few times a week serves as constant encouragement to work on the tree!