Long day....

After a long day at work, it's nice to come home, take a long hot shower, and then settle down in the front of the TV with a bag of chips and salsa and watch Scooby Doo. Cartoons can be very educational, by the way.. I miss the old Looney Toons, and the classics like the Smurfs, David the Gnome...

Okay, so the reason I'm posting is to tell maybe the 2 people that read this blog about this great site my cousin found. It's called myfamily.com and you can create your own family website. You can add pictures, video, and have discussions. This is great, because I and our other cousins are into genealogy. So, we've set up a site that reaches back to the Spevacek-Veverka line we all share.

My crazy hobby started as an assignment in middle school. My mom had this giant chart of my Grandma's side that went back to the 1850's, when some of my German clan came over. I got more interested by the time I got to high school and had another family tree assignment. Turns out I was related to a few kids in my class.

A couple years ago, I started working on tracing all the branches in my family, and now I have several binders full of documents. The easiest way to get started is on www.rootsweb.com, a free site where you can find discussion boards for a specific last name. Another is www.usgenweb.org. It has links for every county, every state in the US. I have met some amazingly kind and generous people online that have helped me get copies of documents, pictures of tombstones and other information.

A couple years ago when my grandpa was in the hospital, I started on my dad's line. I knew nothing, other than my grandparents and my dad didn't know his family history either. Turns out I had older cousins who have been working on it for years! They sent me a huge packet and I was amazed by what I was reading. My great-great grandparents were from Bohemia, Volduchy and Vojvanov (Czechoslovakia.) Because of discussion boards online, we found cousins in Texas we didn't know about. My grandma and I got to meet them at a family reunion, and they are so much fun!

I am very proud of my heritage, and I think it is such a rewarding hobby to have. I have a better understanding of myself. It takes a lot of courage for people to start a whole new life in another country, not knowing the language, anything.