Friday, December 31, 2010

New Year's Resolution(s)

I would really like to finish the first book of the family history this year - but it is slow going, at least in part because it never seems quite "cooked" yet. When do you stop looking for more records?

Keep your hands off their pigs!

I am a - hmmm - what should I call it? A semi-amateur genealogist. Well, actually, I am a victim of the genealogy bug, a disease... it is addictive. I don't even want to mention how much I have spent buying out of print books that contained one obscure fact or another on my (however many greats) grandparents.

Although I had a minor brush with the bug before, I really caught it when I saw a copy of the Castello Map of 1660. The map had identifiable houses denoted on it in New Amsterdam, what we now know as New York City. When I found that a number of these people were grandparents (with varying numbers of "greats" affixed), I became chronically infected.

One of these families was Hans Dreper (or Dreeper) and his wife, Marritie Pieters, who had a house and tavern on the corner of Here Gracht and Stadt Huys Laan. These two were quite the characters, and apparently (given the records I found), were a wee bit attached to their pigs...


Thursday, December 30, 2010

In the beginning...

OK, I am not really sure I am "into this" or not, but thought it might be useful, maybe fun, and possibly interesting... I am not particularly good at this, and must admit that I generally don't see any sense in blogging. Having a cup of coffee across a table seems a better way to have a conversation. But I do enjoy holding court, so maybe this is one way to do so, even if I can't smell the coffee. 

It may take me a while to get the hang of this - it took me an hour and a half to figure out how to post a message... I just kept hitting "edit" in the template and it wouldn't let me edit anything in the text box... then the aha! moment hit - "edit" meant to edit the appearance of the template, not the text I am going to post... I imagine every other facet of this experience will be similarly difficult...

So we will see what this turns into...