Have I dissapeared ???

Some of you are probably wondering if I have disappeared- the answer is no ! I am still here, and the reason for the absence is a happy one.

All of my life , I have wondered about my mother's family. I never knew my maternal grandparents, met them only once for a brief 15 minute visit , and was told very little about them. My dad's family was very close, large, and I was blessed to have an actual relationship with my great grandmother, great grand aunts and uncles, aunts, uncles and dozens of cousins. This made my lack of other side of the family very pronounced. Who was I ? Who were they ? I was told my grandfather was raised in an orphanage but knew his father and one brother and that my great grandfather did some gambling. My maternal grandmother had a mother that was murdered, and that was all. Later in life I was able to develop relationships with my maternal aunts and uncles, but before them was a total mystery. About 20 years ago I started trying to do research on the family, and kept coming up with dead ends.Lots of questions, and the living members of the family started dying off, and the questions haunted me. Meanwhile I knew my dad's family came from Canada,France and Ireland- I met many from the French Canadian ancestors , but the ones from Ireland died before my father was born. His grandfather came from Ireland as a young man, spoke, read and wrote Gaelic, and supposedly his wife's family drank up the profits of an entire town. Fascinating tales , but how true were they ?

For the last 2 yrs we have been watching the show "Who do you think you are" , and for Valentines Day Bob gifted me with a one month subscription to the international data base of Ancestry.com.  I was over the moon and set out to find out what I could , and document the people in the month. Seemed simple enough. Well it turns out I found out as much as I could about my mom's family ( a whole lot of tragedy there) , and discovered not only was my dad's family from Quebec, but I have about 20 ancestors who were amongst the founders of the colony, one who was amongst the original crew who discovered Canada and one who was the first to pilot up the St Laurence. If that was not interesting enough, their ancestors were from the French Aristocracy, and the stories of their lives are fascinating. So it has been about 3 weeks of finding link after link, story after story, and I have still not found the end. I also started on my husband's family, and it is equally as fascinating. There is so much information about our families that we have decided I can serve as the base for a homeschool curriculum for our son. Nick has started researching with me and we are using what we learn to springboard into lessons to cover all the subjects. All in all this makes for wonderfully, happy busy ! And it is so interesting that at the moment it is about the only thing happening .

So still here, still recovering and getting totally lost in history !