Today is day 8 of the Blogtember Challenge on Story of My Life! Today's prompt ask that you, discuss ways that blogging or social media has changed you.
Blogging has created a whole new community for me through friendships I never knew would exist. even ones straight across the world. I've also built some great relationships through sponsors! However, one of the most interesting things that has happened is through Social Media. Facebook has helped put me in touch with some very, very young childhood friends. Friends I always wondered what happened to them since I had moved so much. You can recap on day #1 where i'm from. When we were kids, we didn't use computers, snail mail and long distance phone calls was our way to keep in touch. Of course after time we moved on and made new friends, we were just kids... Finding these old friends was really exciting, but even more exciting was to learn more about my family history. I've always been interested in my ancestry. I had been working in ancestry.com for awhile and thought that I'd research how many people I could find on Facebook with my maiden name. At the time I found about 35 people. I scrolled through the list to see where they were from and one of the girls was from Spearfish, South Dakota. Well that's familiar... Out of 7 of the children, only one of my great, great, great Uncle's was buried there. The others were buried in Wisconsin. I went back on ancestry.com to verify his name and quickly sent her a message on Facebook asking if we may be related. Our family line matched! We were related and are in fact 4th cousins. She put me in touch with her Aunt (my Dad's 3rd cousin, my 3rd cousin once removed) and told me what she new of my great, great, great Grandfather. This Grandfather came to the United States in the mid-1800's from Poland/Prussia. This is the last generation we can trace back, even through a genealogist with all of the information we have. The story my Dad's 3rd cousin told me was very similar to what we knew... So there was no surprise there, but she was very willing to make copies of some of the old photographs she had. so cool!
Linkup: Blogtember @ Story of My Life
That is such a neat story! Genealogy has always fascinated me. And I love that Facebook (which seems to catch a lot of flack these days) was the platform for that kind of discovery! Thanks for sharing :)
ReplyDeleteLove your dress! It looks so cute and comfy at the same time.
OMG I have always wanted to do this, but never found the time, plus all of my relatives are in Europe. You've inspired me though to join ancestry.com tough!!!
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your post. I love blogging (and Facebook, a bit too much I believe). So amazing what internet can do... My uncle tried to create a proper genealogical tree of our family but lacked so much info... Shame he stopped in the end :( xx Olivia
ReplyDeletehttp://not-from-uk.blogspot.com/
I love finding out where my family came from. This is so awesome about your genealogy.
ReplyDeleteOK...this dress is rocking my world, Amanda. It's not available, though. Ahhhhh!!!!
Family stories and finding out where you come from is just so fascinating. Every now and again I haul out the box of old photos just so I can get the family history all over again.
ReplyDeleteMel
Mel's Corner
Superwow!!
ReplyDeleteThis is a very beautiful story!!!
PS: you really look stunning with that dress!!
:)