On Thursday, I received a great email message from a person whose ancestors lived in the same German community as my Wirth ancestors (Gelsendorf in the Galician / Galizien province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). He also provided a detailed genealogy document showing the family of Johann Philipp Wirth and Katharina Geistlinger (my great great great grandparents on my maternal grandfather's side). This is good stuff! This is the power of the internet. I don't even have to seek genealogy information--it finds me!
It's really the result of posting my family information on the internet. I've had my genealogy website up for seven years now. In the past few years, I've received about three to five inquiries a year, and sometimes, as in this case, people actually send me valuable information about my ancestors. I once went for coffee with my Dad's second (?) cousin who I met as a direct result of having a genealogy website.
I love studying my genealogy--connecting with family, solving little mysteries, learning about the past, performing the research and documentation that are so critical. I enjoy all of these elements. This is why it is also very frustrating for me to receive messages like the one on Thursday. It made me want to plunge right into it, but I just don't have the time!
I would really like to sit down and study the document I received (it's in German, so I need to interpret it; the fellow kindly sent a German-English legend to me as well) and enter the relevant information into my genealogy software (Reunion), but that would take several hours. It's just not going to happen right now. (P.S. If anyone in my family wants to take the time to interpret this document, let me know and I'll send the files to you.)
Even so, I did end up spending a couple of hours yesterday working on my genealogy site. For safety and privacy reasons, I decided to remove a lot of details about my living relatives. I also removed my original genealogy pages. Since March, I've had two sets of genealogy data posted--the pages I created in 1997 and those generated by Reunion. I decided to take down the original stuff. That was kind of sad for me. It took me a long time the create those pages, but now the software does it so quickly (though not quite as aesthetically pleasing, in my opinion).
All of this reminds me that I have in my possession huge amounts of genealogical data that I have not had time to enter into my software. *Sigh*
