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What is Family? We all have a family that we are born into.
Basic Family Definition
In the most basic definition, a group of people who share a legal bond or a blood bond is a family.
Legal Bonds: Families are legally bound through marriages, adoptions, and guardianships, including the rights, duties, and obligations of those legal contracts. Legal bonds can be changed, expanded, or dissolved to change the composition of a family.
Blood Bonds: Individuals who are directly related through a common ancestor are part of a family. This includes both close and distant relatives such as siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins. Researching a family tree or genealogical records can reveal familial blood bonds.
It is this second definition that my blog will delve into. Our ancestors our a major part of us. Our overall genetic makeup is determined by those that came before us and without those ancestors, we simply would not be.
From the time I was a boy of five I was intrigued by my family history. I found myself asking mom and dad questions about where grandma and grandpa came from and wanted to know as much about them as I could. I would spend hours grilling my grandparents on their origins and how they came about their names and was always curious about who all of the other people that surrounded them were.
Growing up, I knew the names of my grandparents, my great grandparents on both sides and my great grandparents on both sides. I also knew who all of my aunts and uncles were and most of my great aunts and uncles. That was my family tree....more of a bush than a tree but it was a fine bush.
I started to dig deeper when I was in my 20s and though I did not get much further than the above for many years, eventually I made some discoveries that would give my "bush" some longer "branches" and about three years ago a "tree" started to develop.
A tree that is now growing into a massive structure with many "branches" and thousands of individual "leaves".
It is this tree that I will write about and my hope is I can eventually give names to all of those branches and leaves and in the process learn a bit about all of them and thus learn more about myself because after all, a big part of who we are is who we come from.
I hope everyone who comes upon this blog enjoys my posts.
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