Friends Gone

[Rebekah Canada]

Hi,

I was working on an e-mail this morning when I stopped to fact check the earliest year the genealogy-DNA mailing list talked about DNA patterns for Christmas lights. The thread is here.
http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.co...-11/1133124169
In reading the old posts, I was reminded that one was from Kenny H. and another from Glen Todd. They are both gone as are so many others. I object. It is what I like least about genealogy and genetic genealogy. Year after year more of my friends are gone.

[Earl Davis]

I agree.

It's getting terrible how many times I find out all my relations and connections from back in the 1990's have since died.

There have been so many times in the last 10 years when I send off an email to old contacts about some amazing new discovery only to discover they have died since we were last in touch.

I drew up my first family tree chart aged 8 years old in 1976 and started to get 'serious' about documenting all this 'stuff' in 1998 when I was aged 30. Most of the great aunts who helped back then are long since dead as are most of the then retired people I initially contacted via rootsweb in the late 90's.

I even got contacted very recently by a daughter of a lady I corresponded with back in the late 90's who had given me a great deal of help at that time. The daughter was just starting out in genealogy and found me on Facebook and she was unaware that her mother had had an interest in the subject. The daughter was surprised and unaware of the work I had on her immediate family that her own mother had sent to me 15 years previously and that I was able to replay back. It made me have a long think about how badly I share knowledge with my own immediate family should anything happen to me.

Earl.

[gtc]

I think anybody doing family history rues the fact that they didn't start when they were much younger, when lots of their relatives were still alive. However, it seems to be axiomatic that young people are, generally, not interested in such things -- especially time consuming stuff like this.

How many times have we heard "That was then, this is now!" I recall saying it myself a number of times.

Looking at that 2005 Rootsweb link it's interesting to see Doug McDonald mentioning his M17 status. A quick look at the 2006 haplogroup R tree is a stark reminder of how far we have come since then:

http://www.isogg.org/tree/ISOGG_HapgrpR06.html