As I’ve written about before, my family are avid board gamers and card players. Something else many of us love are puzzles. Jigsaw, crosswords, logic puzzles, trivia, cryptograms, sudoku, and, of course, word search puzzles. Our youngest child not only loves doing mazes, he has been creating his own for the family to solve ever since he was six years old. Heck, the way I studied for the LSAT was by working my way through a stack of Dell‘s Logic Problems and Word Games. I was essentially just continuing to do something I was doing anyway, and I did very well on the exam. (Dell was also was the origin of the modern-day sudoku, which ran in its magazine under the name “Number Place” in the late 1970s – which was where I first saw the game.)
While he was primarily a card player – especially cribbage – my maternal grandfather, Leo Burgess, loved the Wonderword, a word search puzzle.
He did it every day. Unfortunately, his local paper, The Lethbridge Herald, stopped publishing it. However, we were living in Saskatchewan at the time and the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix continued to publish it. So I diligently clipped it from the paper every day. When I had what I considered to be enough, I’d mail him a small collection.
I loved doing it for him. I kept it up for a few years. I only stopped when we moved to British Columbia and our new local paper didn’t publish it.
Maybe my love for puzzles and word games is why I love genealogy. It’s essentially one perpetual puzzle!
A Deck of Ancestors 