Genealogists are strange creatures.
We live for the dead or the missing. We revel in bettering our investigative skills, similar to those used by detectives, lawyers or the police, while piecing together the most complicated of puzzles, analyzing and dissecting clues, theories, stories. We learn to analyze like psychologists, historians, learn to read maps. Our communication skills begin to rival those of therapists and psychiatrists. Out of necessity, we become cryptographers and graphologists to decipher illegible documents, signatures, misspellings.