One night in mid-December 2002, I was surfing the internet and was about to log off and go to bed, when I decided to head over to Ancestry.com and see if I could find out where my Parker name came from. I had just planned to quickly see if I could trace my Parker line back to the originating country, but was having no luck finding any Parkers that were related to me. I didn't have much information to go off of, either, and the Parker surname is extremely common. I entered numerous searches into their database and was just about ready to log off after having no luck, when I decided to enter my grandmother Marjorie Weber's name into a search. Well, that finally hit on a tree (researched by Dixon Smith) that had quite a bit of her ancestry on it. Since my grandmother died almost 11 years before I was born, I knew very little about her and found all this information to be very interesting. I printed her ahnentafel chart and went to bed.
The next day I got back on the computer and did a little more research. I eventually downloaded a genealogy program to organize the data I had, and began to fill in the names of family members that I knew. Soon, I was hooked and spent every night on the computer looking for more information and then organizing that information during the day.
Another thing that got me really interested in researching my genealogy was the research my mother had on her paternal (Laubinger) ancestors. She had been (and still is) corresponding through the mail with a distant cousin in Rendsburg, Germany, named Winfried Laubinger. Winfried had been doing the Laubinger genealogy in Germany for quite some time and sent my mother the Laubinger family tree going back to the 1500s, along with a wealth of other information on the Laubingers.
With all of the information I had obtained from my internet searches and with the help of other researchers on the message boards and such, I was able to fill in even more of the blanks, which led to me getting more and more addicted to this genealogy thing. I also began to learn how to narrow my research and use records such as the federal censuses to aid me. I now have thousands of relatives in a family tree that grows bigger every day.
To put into perspective just how addicting genealogy is, when I need a break from my own research, I spend time researching other people's families (such as aunts and uncles that are married into my family), and I've spent a good deal of time researching famous and historical people (the "Mayflower" passengers are a favorite of mine, although I cannot claim a "Mayflower" relative yet). My genealogy file is over a gigabyte, and is still growing at a rapid pace.
I never planned to begin this project and went into it completely blind, knowing nothing at all about genealogy. In fact, I didn't buy my first genealogy books until January 2004, over a year after beginning my research. If I could have seen into the future on that fateful night in December 2002, and seen what I have compiled and accomplished up to this point, I never would have undertaken such a huge project. Fortunately, I wasn't blessed with any sort of sixth sense or psychic ability and did take this research on, because I have absolutely no regrets. As pitiful as this might make my life sound, I can honestly say that finding a new ancestor or getting an email with more family information in it is euphoric for me (ok, maybe not euphoric, but it is pretty damn exciting and it makes my day). I am not ashamed to say that I've become a genealogy addict.