What Will You Do with Your Genealogy?

Family history is an exciting thing to explore. You are learning so much about where you and your family came from. You spend countless hours gathering names, dates, locations and stories passed down through generations. Now that you have all of that, what will you do with it?

There are a variety if things you can do with your genealogy research. Many people like to put together information into books for other family members. If the story is compelling enough, it may even make for a good book to publish. You can also put together projects to help teach and inspire others to dig into their own family history.

What are you planing to do with you genealogy?

Exploring "The Old Trunk"

Today I read "The Old Trunk" (1888) by Powhatan Bouldin Jr. This guy is my great-great grandmother's fourth cousin (mine four times removed). I find it a very interesting look at colonial life in Virginia as well as a great resource for genealogy. Everyone should be so lucky! (You can read my book review HERE).

I do want to share a quote from page 25 that I think is relevant to anyone researching their family. It is a description of going through that old trunk:

"This old document, is so tatters and torn, and the ink so pale that it can scarcely be read, but we pore over it with the interest of the explorer in the Holy Land. Indeed the contents of the Old Trunk are [mementos] of the past, which have been dug up, as it were, from the stream of dumb forgetfulness; and fortune has been as capricious in her dealing with them as she is with individuals. Now, we draw from the Old Trunk a paper so dimmed by age as to be scarcely legible; presently we come across another of greater antiquity, with every word as plain as when it was written. So, to-day, we meet with a young man whose frame has be wrecked upon the shoals of time; to-morrow with an old man who retains the vigor and buoyancy of youth. Here is a female just verging upon womanhood, from whose cheeks the rose has faded and gone; there is another, the mother of a numerous offspring, who is beautiful to the last."

He really captured it, right? So amazing!

Can't Wait to Read

...the two books I just found out were authored by my 4th cousin, 4x removed. His name was Powhatan Bouldin. He's a distant relative on my mom's side of the family. As far as I can tell, his family was into politics, military, and other important jobs. Luckily, even though the books are more than 100 years out of print, archive.org has the copies available. They have two books:

The Old Trunk (about a trunk of important papers belonging to his family)
Home Reminiscences of John Randolph: Of Roanoke (obviously about John Randolph)

I hope to delve into these books sometime soon to see just what kind of a writer this guy was. Thank goodness for public domain!