Watchers
My Trees
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My great-grandmother, Person:Mabel Vincent (3), known to me as Pommie, completed a great deal of research in her time. Having passed away in 1990, at the age of 96, she was never able to learn the great wonders of the internet. There were no e-mails to exchange, no websites like Ancestry, Geneology or WeRelate in order to link her to distant family trees. She was very determined, and completed her research using old-fashioned (by today's thinking) methods. She spent a great deal of her life travelling the world in order to extend her family tree. Unable to type in a name and find scanned and transcribed pages of her ancestors footsteps, she had to travel to remote towns, make connections with the people and find her information by flipping through dusty books of registries and logs.

Years after her passing, this information has been passed down to the younger generations. By using the modern technologies, I have been able to greatly extend various branches of the family tree, and learning interesting facts about the people I am related to - some 25 generations apart. Granted, using the internet for information is not without its perils, as not all information available is always accurate. There have been some fanciful extensions, like those that link themselves as decendents of Jesus Christ (not saying it isn't true, but lacks probability in my opinion). Understanding this concept means that I have become very watchful of

I am also intrigued at the number of times my tree has spread apart, only be be linked back together farther up the tree. I understand why this happens, as people of the same faith, living in small towns for many years would eventually marry a 3rd or 4th distant cousin. Being able to draw lines connecting this person and that person, or selecting large sections on my Excel spreadsheet to extend those branches.

Being an artist in nature, it has always been my goal to create a large scale bound book for mapping out my family tree. While I find technology to be a wonderful tool for research, I have a fondness in my heart for heavy paper and hand drawn pages, with fold outs, pop-ups and small excerpts providing more detail (especially about the witches and Kings). I like the images of family trees actually drawn onto tree drawings and family crests. This would be one of those "Bucket List" projects, not something that I would be completing by next Tuesday and publishing for the masses.

While my great-grandmother, my mothers-fathers-mother (Mabel Vincent), was able to research an extensive amount of information on her own genealogy, the rest of my family tree is fairly sparse. It is believed (and disputed) that my mothers-mother was adopted, so I am able to research her adopted families lineage, there is little I can find of her biological family. There is a story in my family that her mother had become pregnant, and as this would have been frowned upon, took a "vacation" for a period of time, and returned home the following year with an "adopted" child. Which side of the family story is true, I will probably never know, as my own Grandmother was unsure.

Also the part of my own Surname, Hoffman, from my fathers side, does not go back more than a few generations. It is this family tree I long for additional information on, and am hoping that by posting this, I will one day find some answers.