From: cel@nsscmail.att.com (clayton EDward LEIHY iii)
Subject: Am I Doing This Right? (was: Re: Royalty GedCom, etc.)
Followup-To: soc.roots
Organization: NCR Systems Support Center - New Jersey
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 17:19:31 GMT

Last February, I flew my entire side of the Leihy clan (ten of us) from
New Jersey back to Kansas City, Kansas, for my parents' 50th wedding
anniversary celebration.

While I was there, my dad mentioned that he had compiled our family tree
on a computer.  After getting over the first shock ("My DAD uses a
computer!!"), he offered me a printout.  Turns out it's my brother still
living home who really owns the computer, and the "family tree" was
entered via a word processing program (!!).  Anyhow, I packed the
printout and brought it back to New Jersey.

Our flight back from Kansas City involved a plane change in Minneapolis
(this was during the Super Bowl if I recall, and the airport was quite
busy).  I spent some time as I usually do in airports browsing the gift
shop.  There I found a shareware rack and pickup up a five-dollar copy
of Family Tree Journal.  At this point I honestly had no serious 
intention of doing too much about my ancestry, it just seemed like a
coincidence that my dad gave me a family tree listing and I happened to
find a geneaology program.

(I'm sorry for the long story, but I am trying to get to my point with
all the background included.)

During the past summer, I spent some of my free time (home and work)
inputting the information from my dad's family tree into FTJ.  I also
added all of my wife's family as I talked to her relatives.  I was
aided in this by having available a Company laptop which I was required
to carry from time to time as part of my on-call job.  I just ran FTJ
from the floppy and saved the data to disk.  

Eventually, I wound up with over six hundred names from my (and my wife's
family); this included brothers & sisters, aunts & uncles, cousins,
in-laws (outlaws?), and some of the in-laws' relatives.  I was quite proud
of this "Family Tree", as incomplete as it was.

Then last week, having some time off at Christmas, I finally cracked a
couple of books on genealogy and discovered to my surprise that this
word comes has to do with the tracing of my DIRECT ancestors ("genes").

Finally, the POINT:  Am I way off base in trying to build a collection of
names connected to myself (and my wife), as opposed to devoting more of
my/our energy to ascertaining my DIRECT ancestors in as much detail as
possible??  I really have derived a lot of enjoyment and satisfaction in
just visiting with relatives that I've never seen before (and will probably
never see again), hearing their stories, and recording what I can -- FTJ
does have a neat narrative section where each person's activities can
be documented.

I've still got some relatives (mostly aunts & uncles) that I haven't been
able to query about family yet, mainly since most of them are in the
midwest (Oklahoma - Kansas - Missouri - Nebraska), and I'm here on the
Right Coast.  To me, all of these people seem to be important pieces of
the Leihy puzzle, not just who my parents/gparents/ggparents/etc. were.

Any comments?

Ed (thot he was a genealogist) Leihy
Willingboro, NJ
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU