Genealogical Addiction

An addiction is something that takes over your mind and body and is usually extremely difficult to overcome. That's if you want to overcome the addiction. When I first became interested in digging into family ancestral history, it was 1972 and I'd just moved to Ohio. The Italian family I'd married into knew a few names but no dates or places of origin other than murky stories and vague data. At the time, I was busy raising children and when I hit a brick wall, I quit.

In the fall of 2008, all of that changed. When the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia offered a Family History course, I jumped in with both feet and haven't become unglued yet. It becomes overwhelming, exciting, curious, enthralling, sometimes disappointing.... but always thrilling once answers start filtering through time.

In the past month, I have found connections to cousins and shirt-tail descendants, all as excited as I to connect! My Aunt Audrie's (Hubbard) granddaughter has offered to help me quantify eligibility into the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) through the Hubbard line. I'm dumbfounded that we can do this. Then, there was those shirt-tail relatives I mentioned. (1) Judith is connected through my 3rd g-grandfather's third wife, (2) Jody is connected through Hannah Amy Griggs, the second wife of the same great great grandfather and mother to my great great aunt Clara Myrtle (need to find her descendants...), (3) Nancy is connected through her husband's family tree back to my 4th great grandfather, Glode Dugar Chubb. Now this man and his wife ran the Underground Railroad in Michigan all those years ago and there is a cemetery named after the Chubb family in Nankin, Wayne, Michigan. (4) Joni is connected through Gardner Wood and Fannie Cook in the Hubbard family, the parents of my Elizabeth Wood, wife to Isaac Jabez Hubbard, my 3rd great grandfather .

When it rains it pours.... and I have absolutely no intention of putting up an umbrella... Let the family keep coming. In the mix of all these wonderful people reaching out through the ancestry.com site, I was given a web site for the Wisconsin Historical Society and I sit here amazed and emotional that a couple took the time to traipse through some of Ashippun, Wisconsin's cemeteries to snap photographs of gravestones and post them on the internet. I couldn't believe my eyes when I found Delinda O. (Greene) Hubbard's stone along with the Wood/Cook stone. And here we go, another question surfaced. The Hubbard stone listed Amenzo Hubbard with birth year 1849 - (blank) above his wife's name, Delinda. But Amenzo was buried in Idaho so he didn't get back to join his wife in spiritual slumber. Today, I hold in my hands his Certificate of Death confirming his 1925 death; laid to rest in the Morris Hill Cemetery in Boise, Idaho. One more step toward joining the DAR....

AND one of these shirt-tail relatives has a Spanish daughter in law from Cadiz. I am hoping this is a connection I can utilize when my time for Spain and the Silvan and Ruiz stories heat up so I can work some more on my book, Manuela's Petals. Yes, I do eat and sleep sometimes :)