I have always been interested in history and in the history of my family. My maternal grandmother, Pebble Flood, commissioned some family history research in the 1920s to support her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. That research floated around the family for seventy or eighty years. In about 1990, my father’s older brother wrote an autobiography which included some interesting tidbits about the Wilmas and the Dorns.
With this information to build on I started compiling a family tree. I read books and took classes and was fortunate enough to live in San Francisco where there were a couple of excellent genealogy libraries. The personal computer helped in keeping track of it all as I collected over three thousand names and relationships. I even added research on my wife’s family, mostly Irish from New York and San Francisco. I discovered that Lorraine’s Irish grandmother was born Jewish.
After a couple of years reading, taking notes, and lots of postage (no email then) I managed to put together a pretty reliable family history back as far as Rollo, the Norse raider who set himself up as the Duke of Normandy. One of his descendants conquered England. I posted all this on the web and it attracts inquiries from distant cousins, some of whom can add to the story.
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