YOU KNOW YOU ARE AN
ADDICTED GENEALOGIST WHEN.....
you brake for libraries.
you get locked in a library overnight and you don't even notice.
you hyper-ventillate at the sight on an old cemetery.
you'd rather browse in a cemetery than a shopping mall.
you think every home should have a microfilm reader.
you'd rather read census schedules than a good book.
you know every town clerk in your state by name.
town clerks lock the doors when they see you coming.
you are more interested in what happened in 1895 than 1995.
you store your clothes under the bed and your closet is carefuly stacked with notebooks and journals.
Mitchell, Davis, and Tenney are household names, but you can't remember what you call the dog.
you can pinpoint Harrietsham, Hawkhurst, and Kent on a map of England, but can't locate Topeka, Kansas.
ALL your correspondence begins "Dear Cousin".
you've traced every one of your ancestral lines back to Adam and Eve, have it fully documented,
and still don't want to quit.
MURPHY'S Law of Genealogy
The records you need for your family history were in the courthouse that burned.
John, son of Thomas, the immigrant whom your relatives claim as the immigrant ancestor, died on board ship at the age of twelve.
The public ceremony, in which your distinguished ancestor paticipated when the platform collapsed, turned out to be a hanging.
Records show that the grandfather, whom the family boasted, "He read the Bible at four years and graduated from college at sixteen," was at the foot of his class.
Your grandmother's maiden name for which you've searched for years, was on an old letter in a box in the attic all the time.
When at last you solved the mystery of the skeleton in the closet, your tight-lipped
spinster aunt claims, "I could have told you that all the time."
You never asked your father about his family because you weren't interested in
genealogy while he was still alive.
The family story your grandmother wrote for the family never got past the typist. She packed it away "somewhere" and promised to send you a copy, but never did.
The relative who had all the family photographs gave them to her daughter who had no interest in genealogy and no inclination to share.
A great-uncle changed his surname because he was teased in school. He moved away, left no address, and was never heard from again.
Brittle old newspapers containing the information you NEED, have fallen apart,
right on the names, dates and places.
The only record you find for your great-grandfather is that his property was sold
at a sheriff's sale for insolvency.
The portion of the index you need is continued in the next issue, only the
publisher died prior to publication.
When you find the obituary for your grandmother, the information is garbled. Her name is exchanged with her daughter's, the whereabouts of her sons unknown, and the date of her father's birth indicates he was younger than she was.
The ONLY surname not found among the three billion in the LDS Archives is YOURS.
The Vital Records director sends you a negative reply, having just been insulted
by a creep calling himself a genealogist.
The four-volume, 4,800 page history of the county where your great-grandfather
lived is NOT indexed.
