Paper Gypsy, Where Have You Been?

Many apologies to those of you who have sent me e-mails asking if I have fallen off the face of the earth.  I wish it were that simple an explanation.

No, I have been working on a family tree for my daughter.  We live a fair distance from any family (Arizona, Vancouver and South Africa), and I want my daughter to know as much as possible about her roots.  So last month I bought a 1 month subscription on the geneology website, Ancestry .com.  Documenting births, deaths, marriages and immigrations has been a lot of fun, but it has also become an obsession.  I find myself sitting at the computer after midnight, looking a census record and immigration passenger lists.  At present there are over 180 people in our tree, and finding out all I can about them has been "interesting", to say the least. It has been a chore to find information on the American side of the family, and the South African side has been next to impossible to find.

But this work has also kept me away from my quilts and my blog.  Instead of just leaving you all in the dark, I thought it was better to sign on here tonight and update you as to what is happening with this site.  And at the same time, I want to go ahead and share some very special photos with you.

The first photo is my parents' (Marge and Wesley Peterson) wedding in 1947, followed by maternal grandparents' (Joseph and Emma Jozwiak) wedding in 1918, and then my maternal great-grandparents' (Josef and Maria Vosmik) wedding in 1879 in Bohemia.

I am very fortunate that my mom and grandmother loved to tell family stories.  And I am especially blessed that they kept tons of photos, letters, prayer cards and obituary notices.  Unfortunately, there is only 1 birth certificate, no marriage certificates and no death certificates in any of the boxes of "stuff" that my mom left me.  The one birth certificate is for a female baby named Emily Clara, born to my maternal great grandmother. Now, I never heard anything about Emily Clara, who would have been my grandmother Emma's sister.  But while researching census documents, I found that Maria Vosmik gave birth to 12 children, and only 5 survived by 1900.  So I can only guess that Emily Clara was one of the 7 children who died as a young child.  It is so sad to think about, but then I remember stories about how hard life was for an immigrant Bohemian family over 100 years ago.

So, bear with me for a few more weeks here, and I promise to return with more news about projects that I will return to. In the mean time, you will find me at the computer, researching my heart out and putting tons of information into a family tree software package. And I will be remembering wonderful days of sitting on the sofa with my mom and grandma and listening to stories of their lives before I was born.