Several years ago, I was on the Snapfish website on the day when they offered $10 photo books for life (okay, Gary won margaritas for life at Hussongs but $10 books for life is still pretty good). I quickly took advantage of this offer and thus began my preoccupation with creating memory books for special occasions. A few years later, my mom asked me to create a book about her family history with family photos. She and her cousin tried to identify as many people in old photos as they could. I took it one step further and started my genealogy journey to identify ancestors.
At that time, I joined Family Search and the free version of Ancestry.com. My very first “real” discovery was finding finding my great grandparents on her father’s side. My mother had no real information about them other her grandfather’s name, John McLeod, and her grandmother’s first name Sarah. I soon determined that there are lots of John McLeod’s in the world and found the elusive search to figure out which one was connected to us a bit perplexing. Then I discovered my first primary source, the record of marriage of my great grandparents which also included the names of his parents, Malcolm and Mary McLeod and Sarah’s parents, Oliver and Catherine Liggett.
I have since expanded my ability to conduct genealogy research by subscribing to the full version of Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com. I also joined the Genealogy Club in our community. I received some great tips and suggestions on getting started with my research. (Unfortunately, with Covid we have not been able to meet but I am hopeful that this will change in the near future.)
