Category: Personal Story

52W Mark IV – Week 1 (Part One): In The Beginning

And now for something completely different

This week’s prompt for Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors Challenge might be “In The Beginning”, but as I enter the fourth go-around (after two earlier failed attempts), the Challenge is hardly new to me anymore. In fact, as I wrote last week, my participation in the Challenge has begun to result in diminishing returns. Looking at the list of this year’s prompts, I see many topics on which I’ve already written – some of which I think I’ve exhausted. So this year I’m going to do something different.

This year I’m going to be literal with the “52 Ancestors” challenge and write about 52 ancestors, a different one each week. I’m also going to frame it around the playing-cards theme I established with the title A Deck of Ancestors and my very first post of this blog in January 2022, More Than A Full Deck.

I have selected 52 ancestors that I have divided into four suits, with each suit starting with my great grandparents and working my way back to all of my great great great grandparents. In order to have 13 cards for each suit, I’m treating each married couple of great grandparents as a single card. I’m afraid I wasn’t very creative in making up the suits. I simply went with the initial of the surname of each of my great grandfathers, so the suits are “V”, “K”, “B”, and “L”. The cards for each suit match the colours I assigned to each of those lines in my RootsMagic database.

The four suits, with the number of each person within their suit.

The only downside to this plan is that I have a wealth of information for the individuals who fall within the lower numbers of each suit, while I have very little for many of those who are at the higher numbers. I already know weeks 51 and 52 will probably be incredibly short posts.

That said, I see a few of the prompts for the 2025 Challenge are either relatively new to me. Others might be repeats, but I still have plenty of ideas for them. As a result, from time to time I might jump back into the Challenge as set up for this year, and create entries for those prompts that truly inspire me.

Happy 2025 and Happy 52 Ancestors Challenge!

52W Mark III – Week 52: Resolution

I never make New Year’s resolutions. In fact, I’m terrible at goal setting, although when there’s something I really want to achieve, I can set them. I just hate doing it. One goal I did set and, with this post, have achieved three times over, is completing Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors Challenge.

However, I don’t know if I have it in me to do a fourth full year of the Challenge, at least not in the way I’ve participated for three full years. The Challenge is becoming more difficult and much more work; some weeks it almost feels like a chore. Despite that, it’s remained worthwhile and fun. Otherwise, I doubt I’d have carried through.

The hardest part has been thinking of fresh and new things to discuss, explore, and share. It’s becoming more demanding to thing about things I haven’t already covered before – sometimes more than once (including this very topic, most recently on Week 44). Several times during this year’s Challenge I thought I had come up with something entirely new, only to discover partway through or near completion that I had already written about the same thing. There have been many weeks when I’ve fallen behind because of the difficulty of finding something to write about.

For several months now, I’ve been giving thought about what to do for 2025. Maybe I’ll pick 52 ancestors and write about them. Maybe starting with “one” and working my way through “fifty two”, I’ll write about something associated with the number of the week. Maybe I’ll create my own prompts. Heck, it doesn’t even need to be a regular weekly thing – maybe I could do a monthly post instead.

I know I’m not alone with these thoughts. After having substantially completed this entry but before clicking “Publish”, I looked at what some of the other 52 Ancestors participants posted on Amy’s Facebook group, Generations Cafe. There, Julie Turner Holmansky of Roots & Rabbit Holes shared a post, “Week 52, Resolution: Changing My Blog Up in 2025.” The title alone spoke to me, and her experience and thoughts really spoke to me.

Whatever I do, it will need to be something that is still regular and structured; without it, I can see a future where posts become fewer and farther apart in time, until it just peters out. I don’t want to stop blogging about genealogy. Not only has it kept me writing, I feel like it’s kept me connected to the genealogy community when I shared my posts on Facebook and Bluesky.

That all said, I’ve signed up for next year’s challenge. I would like to see the list of next year’s prompts before making any concrete decisions. There’s still two full weeks for me to think about it, especially since I started Christmas vacation about 45 minutes ago!

Rather than ending on uncertainty, let’s end on a high note. I think I need to recognize my accomplishment of completing three years’ worth of weekly blog entries. That’s 156 posts, not counting the occasional incidental genealogy post outside of the 52 Ancestors Challenge. I did it!!

Whether I’m doing Amy’s 52 Ancestors Challenge or some other thing with this blog in 2025, I know that I want to keep up the good habit of writing about my genealogy that this challenge inspired.

52W Mark III – Week 51: Good Deeds

For the most part, the genealogical community is a wonderfully supportive and delightful group of people. At our best, we’re collaborative, sharing, thoughtful, insightful, and keen to help each other reach our genealogical goals. I’ve benefitted a lot from other genealogists and I hope I’ve been able to contribute my fair share.

While I can think of many examples, perhaps the greatest genealogical good deed was the kindness of an unexpected gift from the late Lorine McGinnis Schulze of Olive Tree Genealogy. (While Lorine passed away in 2022, her website and blog are still online.)

When I was in elementary school, I got an amazing genealogy book for kids through Scholastic book orders, called Digging for My Roots. It is full of charts, tables, and other worksheets for you to fill in as you learn about your family history. It’s been out of print for decades, but I still have my copy.

My copy of Digging for My Roots, which I’ve had since I was a kid.

Our eldest son developed an interest in genealogy when he was seve years old – about a year or two younger than I was when I started. I even bought him a membership in the British Columbia Genealogical Society for his tenth birthday. It hasn’t a passing fancy, either. He’s now almost in his mid-teens and he is still deeply interested and involved.

When he became interested in genealogy, I started looking for kid-appropriate genealogy books for him. However, none of the currently published books I could find were anywhere near as good as Digging for My Roots. Some were okay, but many were subpar.

Back in the good old days, before it was sold and turned into a dumpster fire, Lorine posted a question on Twitter, asking the genealogical community what inspired us to take up our search for our ancestors. In my response, I mentioned the book in passing and how I would love to have a copy for my son.

A few months later, I received a direct message from Lorine. It turns out that after seeing my Tweet, on her own volition she searched out a copy of the book, and found one. She bought it and wanted to send it to me to give to my son.

The amazing thing was that the book was pristine. None of the worksheets had been filled in. Forty-plus years out of print, and not a single item filled in. I was gobsmacked. Not only that, but Lorine absolutely refused to let me pay for the book. She wouldn’t even let me pay for the shipping.

Lorine did not have to do any of that for us. I’m also certain that she had so much on her plate that there was no need to put in the time it must have taken to do this for us. I’m sure I must have interacted with her with some “likes” and retweets, but otherwise she did not know me at all and I only knew her through her website and social media presence. I cannot think of any reason for her to have done this for an otherwise complete stranger other than the kindness of her heart.

Thanks to Lorine’s good deed, my son and I both have copies of Digging For My Roots!

52W Mark III – Week 50: Chosen Family

As Amy noted in describing this week’s prompt for the 52 Ancestors Challenge, family isn’t just those to whom you’re genetically related. Many might add that it goes beyond just people. I know lots of people who consider their pets as part of the family. I suggest you can go beyond that, especially if you’re a child. For many children, a favourite stuffie can be as much a part of what they consider to be family as any living creature.

Our youngest definitely considers his favourite stuffy, Vivi, to be part of his adopted family. Not only that, he has created a whole “biological” family for her! Of course, he knows it’s not real and that Vivi is just a toy, but he has a very active imagination, wonderful creativity, and a lot of empathy.

Mere moments after unwrapping Vivi – she still had her tag on her!

He received Vivi from my youngest sister as a gift for his fourth birthday. The moment he tore off the wrapping paper and I caught a glimpse of Vivi, I did not think much of her. Of course, our little guy took to her and hugged Vivi right away. At that time, he had been forming strong attachments to a “favourite” stuffie that lasted only a matter of weeks. Looking at Vivi, I figured that pattern would would continue and she’d be quickly forgotten. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Vivi has been by our son’s side since he got her. He is connected to Vivi the way Linus is connected to his blanket. Our son has created a whole world, history, and back story for Vivi. He named her very quickly after receiving her. I thought he could not have chosen a less likely name. Later, he gave Vivi a surname – “Okayer”, which is pronounced “Oaker”. Over time, he had named Vivi’s birth parents. Vivi is a “Specktogosaurus”, a species of dinosaur of our son’s own imagination. In video games, he creates characters that are named Vivi or Okayer.

Just chillin’.
Buckled up for a car ride!
Vivi plays goal. She loves hockey like a true Canadian!
Hibernating for the winter. She was in for a huge surprise when it came time to vacuum.

I was not understating it when I said our son has created a whole biological family for Vivi. Like his big brother, our son has developed an interest in genealogy. Not as passionately as me or his brother, but he is interested nevertheless. He enjoys sitting in beside me for portions of the monthly online meetings of the BC Genealogical Society. He loves to join me on trips to the BCGS library. His big project is trying to find a genealogical connection to his best friend, who he has known since pre-school. His other project has been to build a database for Vivi’s family tree.

Our boys share a home computer. One of the first things I installed when we got it was a copy of RootsMagic for our eldest. About a month or so ago, our youngest asked me if he could use it as well. Of course! I sat down with him and walked him through the basics, starting with a brand new database. I thought he was going to track our family, or the research he’s done of his friend’s family (which is pretty impressive for a nine-year-old!). Nope, he wanted to enter Vivi’s family.

Vivi’s pedigree on RootsMagic 10
Vivi’s genealogical information, with his birth parents and adoptive parent (owner).
The family group for Vivi’s biological parents. I hadn’t known Vivi was a middle child!

Last week, he asked his aunt where she bought Vivi. Could he be looking for an addition to her family? No, he just wants to know that there is a place where there were more Specktogosauruses and that Vivi hadn’t been alone. I then reminded him that we had once seen another Specktogosaurus at the Calgary Airport.

A long-lost relative?