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I began getting interested in genealogy not long after my twin sons were born. It might have had to do with the fact that I kept hearing about how twins were hereditary, and it might have been because my maternal grandmother, Jewel Chamblee Knierim, had done a great deal of genealogy work in the 70's, back when you had to wander through cemeteries, do research in libraries and visit courthouses to get copies of marriage, birth, and death records and census reports. She attended numerous family reunions of our distant relatives, to gather information about our ancestors. So perhaps I had inherited the bug.

My mom and I were planning on taking Aliza to attend a family reunion in June of 2006, and I started thinking about how I really didn't know most of the people who would be there. I started looking at some of my grandmother's genealogy stuff, and what my mom had put on her computer, and I started thinking about making a family tree of the folks that would be at the reunion. That way we'd all have pictures and a tree to follow for reference, and we'd all know whom each other was.

I printed out the information I'd need from Family Tree Maker on my mom's computer, and got started. I did it all from scratch in MS Word. I created a tree just by making boxes and drawing lines, and added photos and other tidbits of information (birthdays, wedding dates) wherever I had them. I found lots of missing information and my mom emailed her cousins to get the missing information along with dozens of photos.
After I had spent hours and hours working on the book for several months, someone at work informed me of the fact that Family Tree Maker will actually make nice family tree pages for you that you can then use to put together a book. So I got the software for myself, and began entering information from my Grandma's records. I was a little obsessed - any free moment I had, I sat at the computer, flipped to the next page in her records, and entered in names and dates.

It was like I was getting to know these people. It's fascinating, how different life was 100 and 200 years ago. Folks got married and started having families very young, and having a family of 10-15 children wasn't unusual at all. It also wasn't unusual for some of those children to die young. Imagine having 10 children, another one every 2-3 years, and not even knowing what an epidural was. Imagine that you have 6 or 8 little kids, and then you are pregnant with twins!

When I got to the end of my grandmother's records, I jumped on the Internet and looked up the oldest ancestor she had found, and immediately found his sisters and brothers and parents. I heard somewhere that genealogy is the second most common use for the internet. I never would have believed it a year ago, but now that I've spent some time doing research, I see how much information there is out there and I'm itching to get at it!

So far I can trace the Chamblees back 8 generations, to Isaac Chamblee, born about 1745, and Lucretia Jones, born about 1748. Other branches of my family tree are fairly sparse so far, so I have some work to do. Having a genetic mutation that runs in my family, though, has given me great motivation to do more research, and find out more about my ancestors.

There's a link below to a page with the list of all decendants of Isaac and Lucretia. As I add family members to this tree, I'll fill in the report. Please let me know at mbaza5@yahoo.com if you have:

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My ancestor, Daniel Lovet, was reportedly born 15 May 1769, possibly enroute to this planet, although perhaps it was his parents who were beamed down from the spaceship (this part isn't real clear yet). His parents either remained aboard, or were beamed back aboard, for no earthly record has been found of them. At any rate, after Daniel's marriage to Mary James on 11 Sep 1794 in Allegeny Co, MD, he spent the remainder of his lifetime on this planet. Their oldest son, John, married Anna Price (1821, OH) and had three sons by 1827. Since no other record of Anna's birth, life or death can be found, it is obvious that not only was she beamed down from a spaceship, but her mission was completed sometime in 1827 and she was therefore beamed back aboard. John, on the other hand, spent his entire lifetime on this planet. It is not certain if more than one spaceship is involved in this process.