My interest in family history began at an early age. I was in the GATES program in elementary school. We always got to do neat studies on various subjects, one of them genealogy.
I was about 10 when I did this project in 1986. It didn’t go beyond my great-grandparents, but I was fascinated. When you’re a kid, you tend to think in the now. I thought it was so cool that my great-grandparents had immigrated from Sweden. I had never met them, and definitely had never heard their names before. Lars and Eugenia Bergman. So foreign.
We only worked on this for a few months and then moved on to another subject – maybe frog dissecting? I can’t remember exactly.
Genealogy was shelved for me.
I didn’t revisit it again until I had my first daughter, almost 12 years ago.
I often wonder how much more information I could have gleaned had I asked my grandparents more questions when they were still alive.
