Relative Relations

My sister-in-law, Kennetta Dines Lemon, was here and spent the night on Saturday.  She's a genealogy buff like me, but much more detail oriented.  She created her own genealogy program on her computer using Excell.  She has notebooks filled with documents and sources and her trip up here was another fact finding mission.  She visited 3 or 4 cemeteries and then went to the Grand Rapids Public Library, which I didn't even know was open on Sundays.  She's one of those genealogists you love to hate.  She documents her sources to the "T", she contacts funeral homes and sextons and county registers of deeds.  She's the genealogist I aspire to be but probably never will attain.

We had great fun during her visit talking of dead and living relatives.  We also made plans to visit the Library of Michigan and Macomb County.  I see a trip to Salt Lake City in our future.  I wonder if she's aware of the Family History Libraries the Mormons run?  She lives with my brother in Indiana, near Fort Wayne, which has a library with an extensive genealogy library.  She says she hasn't been able to find much information there relevant to her searches. 

She did respark my own genealogy passion, which is always welcome.  I'm excited about tomorrow which is the start of the free 5 day access to Ancestry.com's international marriage records.  So many of my ancestors lived, married and died in Canada and I can't wait to see what information I can gather.

One of those years, I think...

Genealogy and blogging have taken a backseat to life lately.  I paid someone to finish updating my genealogy website and tweaked a thing or two here and there and then just abandoned it.  Typical me.  I hit a brick wall and get discouraged and drop everything for awhile until suddenly one day, seemingly out of the blue, my interest is rekindled and I'm back on the trail of people dead hundreds of years.

I have emails to answer on ancestry.com, leads to follow up on, cleaning up of my website to do and yet I do nothing.  I was supposed to make a trip to Lansing to the Library of Michigan to see if I can find the obituaries of John Lemon and his son Frank, and see if the library has copies of Acorns to Oaks, the genealogy newsletter for Oakland County, which has an article on the Isaac Lemon bible.  I seriously doubt it's my Isaac Lemon, there were a few of them in Oakland County in the same time period as mine.  I guess that can wait, or so is my attitude lately.

Had a phone conversation with a descendant of John Lemon.  Her father was Clayton Lemon Jr, her grandfather Clayton Lemon Sr., the son of John Lemon, my great grandfather's brother.  I sent her email invitations to my site and to my tree on ancestry.com, but I haven't heard back from her.  I was hoping she'd have a picture of her dad and grandfather.  She said that her dad and grandfather were truck drivers, which is typical for Lemons.  My father and his twin brother were truck drivers, their father was a teamster as was his father.  Interesting how things like that pass down through families.  Her father sounded a lot like my father.

So until my passion for genealogy is rekindled, I apologize for the sparse nature of my updates.