The Beginning, part 1

One afternoon in the fall of 1995, youngest son Tom, then age 17, decided that we should begin investigating our ancestors - including especially (but not limited to) his g3grandfather, Thomas S. Jordan.

Although books had been written about several of Tom's family lines, I had never been interested in our family history aside from a curiosity about Tom's Indian (Native American) g3gmother whose ethnicity was more than just a "family story", given that she was my beloved grandmother's grandmother.

Tom's Indian g3gmother's daughter married Thomas S. Jordan's son, who was the only great-grandparent I had an opportunity to know and love and remember. My son's expressing an interest in this line triggered an interest that would probably not have occurred if he had mentioned any other of his lines.

We immediately called my first cousin who lived in the area of Alabama where Thomas S. Jordan had died - we had been told at one time that she was researching. She generously sent us copies of the information she had accumulated.

We began gathering copies of books about our family lines - we owned a few, but more had been written. Cousins loaned us copies or duplicated pages of the ones that were unavailable for purchase. I was already involved online in non-genealogy internet mailing lists and such, so looked for and found some genealogy resources, including the wonderful e-mail lists at maiser.indiana.edu that Larry Stephens had created and the Roots Surname List that Karen had created at RootsWeb.

Son Tom had meanwhile become deeply involved with college again. He had limited time to spend on researching ancestors, although he was still interested - but I was addicted already...............

The main difficulty at that point was one factor that continues to present a hurdle. I "migrated" to Mississippi as an adult - generations of our ancestors had migrated down the Atlantic coast to Georgia, then to Alabama, where I was born - courthouses here in Mississippi do not have the information I need. Were it not for the internet, researching our ancestors would be impossible for me.