How This All Started

I have my Aunt Judy to thank for encouraging me, for inspiring me, to look into my ancestry. My father was an only child. He was born in Flomaton, Alabama and moved around back and forth there and lived in various parts of Louisiana until he graduated from high school. At that time he joined the Navy and spent the next ten years seeing the world. He was stationed in Bethesda Naval Base at Bethesda, Maryland when he met my mother who is called Bubbles by her family. She worked there at the time and had lived her life in Silver Spring, Maryland with her parents and one sister. My Aunt Judy was my only aunt although we had many great aunts and great uncles. My Aunt Judy is only about eleven years older than me and when I think of fun she always comes to mind. I have many wonderful memories of her and throughout my early years we sometimes lived in the house with my grandparents and her as Dad was gone a lot at sea.
About 2 years ago my Aunt Judy mentioned her tree on Ancestry.com and gave me permission to see it.I was amazed at how much work she and her daughter, Teri (the oldest of my four first cousins) had done.There were other family members also interested in Ancestry who were exchanging pictures and things about the Wolfe family. (That is my grandmother's maiden name, the mother of my mother and Judy.) They also had a lot about my grandmother's mother's family, the Getzendanners, who were from Frederick, Maryland.I was hooked. At that time I was really sick and only checked in periodically to see what was going on. When Aunt Judy and Teri came when my father died we discussed some of what they had found and I was fascinated. I kind of wanted to start researching Dad's family but I was skeptical that I could find much. His parents had moved to New Jersey the last ten years of my grandmother's life and only about two years of my grandfathers. I had asked them things and they had told me some things that aroused my curiousity but at that time my life was so busy. By the time my Dad passed away I had been out of work for awhile, with frequent hospitalizations for pneumonia. The following June I was hospitalized and it was determined I needed open heart surgery. My employer let me go and as it turned out I would not have been able to return to work anyway. The past few months I was getting in more of a routine with being home and from time to time I wondered if I might find out anything about the Mancil family or the Poston family. I really wasn't able to find anything and decided to do a free trial of ancestry for two weeks. I was amazed at all the resources they put at my finger tips and immediately began discovering things.As I was able to go along filling in more and more squares with names and dates I began to feel so connected to the past. I think one of the things that was really fulfilling was finding the names of my grandher's grandparents.