Voices from the Past

Much of this last week, I have been spending more time amongst the dead than the living. I am working on a genealogy book to share with my children so that they don't have the thirty-year+ struggle that I have had tracing my ancestors, many times banging my head against a seemingly unbreakable wall.

Over the last few days, several of those brick walls have crumbled but good. I have found little bits and pieces about various branches of my family over the years, but as each generation passes, more is lost to those of us that come along later. Thanks to the work of other genealogists and the Internet, some of that "lost" information is no longer lost. I have found information that I didn't know that I didn't know. I have found names of collateral relatives (as in, not a direct-line relationship with me) as well as death certificates and, in the case of one woman, a birth certificate.

Last night, I stumbled across a website devoted to the genealogy of one of my great-great-grandmothers, Philadelphia Isabella, who was an Evatt before she married a Pressley, and her siblings. I had the names of her parents before and now I have pictures of them.

Here they are, my great-great-great grandparents, Jared David and Margaret Bush Gaines Evatt.

I can't begin to express the excitement that I feel with each new discovery, especially when those discoveries involve pictures of these folks that I never got to know. I am because they were and it is just incredible to get to put a face to their names after all of these years!