User:Gold lotus 99

Update 4 April 2012: I'm on-line again, as of yesterday. Have been dealing with health issues (successfully), and look forward to uploading documents, photos, etc. that I've gathered, and resuming my genealogy research.

My curiosity about family history started in childhood, and has grown over the years. I'm most interested in the details of life events, looking for the stories that emerge from the collection of facts discovered about each person and family. Searching for records on-line is like playing a game -- seriously fun!

I've joined here with the primary intention of building on the work others have done on people from my lines, most of which was not on We Relate. In the process of adding and updating people, researching and adding sources is also my priority. My eventual goal is to source and cite the major life events of those in my direct line.

I was fortunate to inherit hundreds of letters sent by an ancestor to her future husband between 1881 - 1886. Most are written from her home near the Illinois-Wisconsin border to his in Iowa, yet she also traveled and wrote from other places. Most letters include incredible detail. When she visited her brother at college, she included everything from the address of his boarding house to a description of the fossils a professor of the college showed her on a tour. Her father was a justice of the peace who held court at their home, and she reports on some of those cases. One letter included a swatch of fabric pinned to the paper, and she explained it was a sample of her new dress material.

Hopefully I will finish transcribing the letters by June 2012. After completing over a hundred, the box they were in appears to be as full as before, so there may actually be more than a thousand total. I'm not sure yet if or how this personal project might benefit other researchers, and will be exploring that in the next year, also.