Once upon a time, a long, long time ago....Okay, instead of a make-believe fairy tale, here is how it all began.When I was in the 8th grade, I needed to come up with an indepth study project for my talented and gifted class. My biggest concern was the fact that I had to stick with this subject for a whole year. I would be doing a presentation in April after studying the topic since September. So I wanted somethingthat was varied enough I wouldn't get bored with it. I had a fascination with history but I didn't want to be restricted to one area, so I thought if I chose family history, I could research a variety of time periods. And so it all began....
Because I was only in the 8th grade, my mom agreed to take me to court houses, cemetaries, and visiting relatives. Both of my mother's parents were still alive and so was my dad's father, but not many other older relatives. So I wrote letters (this was long before email was big), visited courthouses, libraries, extended family, and cemetaries, and started to keep track of all of the information on cards, in notebooks, and on big circular pedigree charts. By the time spring came around, we had much more information than my teacher expected. For a simple school project, it was almost out of control. But what we didn't know then, is that it would become much more than a simple school project.
Instead my mother and I have been working on this since the 1989-90 school year. I had to take a break when I was in college, but that certainly did not stop my mother. It was during that time that she began her explorations of the resources to be found on the internet, on listservs, and the benefits of email, gedcom, and computerized filing. She has more correspondance books than I can even count and the majority of our work is stored at her home in what is affectionately called The Computer Room.
We have taken a variety of genealogy vacations over the years from Des Moines, IA to Madison, WI to Springfield, IL. In the summer of 2000 we even got so brave as to take a two week vacation to travel by car from Iowa across the north part of the United States to Washington, D.C and then back to Iowa. My mother and I don't even live in the same state anymore but that doesn't stop us.
Our most recent goal is the publishing of our work on the internet. After the development of another addictive hobby, web page design, we decided to mesh the two hobbies. There were many benefits of this to us. The first was a non-flammable copy of what we had. We had often worried about what would happen if a fire started or a tornado hit my parents' house. The second benefit is that it allowed us to share information without having to photocopy and send the information through the mail. While I don't have all of what my mother has in Iowa and she doesn't have all that I have in Missouri, we are able to keep track of what the other is doing over our publications on the internet. The third benefit is a reduction of the paper copies we have in our homes. If you are like us, we have a whole room dedicated to our hobby. I'm able to copy materials from genealogy libraries all over the country, then document my information from these sources on our internet pages.
This web page is an ever growing, ever changing site. There may be times when it seems very static, but that is only because sometimes the regular part of our lives interferes in the time we have for our hobby.Julie and Carolyn Jensen