i have a wonderful mother! whom i know very little of her side of the family and had not seen much of them as children and sick-ness came. so one day i’d started a venture to learn and have not regretted hearing of the rohde/rhode family ,they are all around me! and might even be 4th cousins , so to approach them is my next step; sir how are you related to..? is this the right approach? my title is the singing von trapp family. even my grandfathers step mother is a {‘luther’ }Domke,so that’s another story! and oh how i want to approach ,yet be safe.
Researching family history is about finding information on our ancestors, discovering relatives and hearing new stories, not heard before, about all these people.
Recording and collating this information for your family tree – and ensuring that your family and descendants will have access to it in the future – has far-reaching effects, not the least of which is improving your writing skills.
This article in the Sterling Observer describes how Marianne Wheelaghan (Edinburgh, Scotland) caught the “genea-bug” and how it led to writing her debut novel, The Blue Suitcase. It’s about her mother’s and aunt’s experiences growing up in Germany during WWII.
Marianne said she had very limited knowledge of her mother Gertrude’s background. She knew her mother was born and raised in Germany, and came to live in Scotland after the war.
One day, a suitcase filled with letters and diary pages was discovered by a family member. The documents were written by Marianne’s aunt (Gertrude’s sister) who immigrated to Argentina after the war. Translated, they provide insight into their lives during war-time Germany.
Marianne – thanks to these documents – become very interested in her family history, and began to write her book.
Has finding information about your family inspired you to begin a new hobby (family history), or even to start a new career?
Let us know in the comments section below.
Anne Marie Hoekstra
August 22, 2012
Yes, finding information about my family inspired my to start a blog: . There I write to my great-grandmother in the year 1912 en she writes to me. Very often we are surprised about each others lives and stories. My great-grandmother Plonia Loeve was 22 years old in 1912, just married and pregnant. Everything in her life is different: her work, her clothes, her traditions, her church… I think about writing a book about her life and her era. I already did a lot of research by interviewing family, reading books, visiting museums, etc.