Like many people, I have recently been caught up in the hunt for my past relations. My explorations in genealogy have taken me across the ocean and back several times over, although only virtually so far. Along the way I have made many fascinating (to me at least) discoveries and even solved a mystery or two. I've also hit many a brick wall in the form of relatives that seem to appear out of nowhere, as well as photos of people whom no one can identify. These are the common frustrations of an amateur genealogist. Online genealogy programs can only offer so much. They are wonderful for discovering facts and absolutely fantastic for connecting with people searching for similar information but they lack the ability to do the one thing that interests me most. They fail to tell the stories.
I began this blog as a place to fill in some of the details between the facts. Of course not everyone has a story that's noteworthy enough to write about and among those that do, much has been lost over time. Some of the people I hope to write about didn't leave enough behind to tell their own stories, so in some cases I may have to speculate the reasons why they ended up where they did, both geographically and philosophically. And in some cases I may just write about what I know and what I wish I did, in the hopes that someday someone else will be able to fill in the gaps.
With the exception of my French ancestors (who are a whole book unto themselves, with the pedigree to prove it), most of my relatives arrived in Canada sometime in the early part of 19th century. It was a turbulent time in the soon to be new country and things were changing rapidly, My great great grandfather John McCluskey, pictured in the header, appears on paper to lived in a number of different places but in reality he moved only once; it was the frequent renaming of the region he lived in that makes him look like a nomad! How and why he came to be there in the first place is the part that I find most fascinating and what I hope to be able to find out more about. His is just one of the many stories I hope to write about here.
These are not my stories, but they are the stories that made me who I am. I hope I do them justice.
