Kinda Mildly Obsessed

Every so often I'll get interested in something that turns into an obsession. I don't want to do anything else and I can't wait to spend time working on whatever is my new project. This was much easier to do when I was still childless. The girls have a way of really insisting on such unreasonable things as being fed. They even demand to play with me. Can you imagine anything so unreasonable?

Needless to say, with all the time I've been spending on genealogy this week, the house is chaos. I've managed to keep up with the kitchen, but the living room looks like small children stood in the middle of the room and spewed toys everywhere. Oh, wait, they did.

On the other hand, I've been finding information everywhere I look about the lines I'm following up on. It's fascinating to see how surnames move together around the country. I've been working a lot on one family who spent several generations in one Kentucky county. All the families of that county intermarried like crazy, to the point that they had to have been marrying cousins. In fact, I did find one pair of first cousins who married each other. And then, all of a sudden, it was like they all picked up and moved to Illinois. Not just the name I'm looking for, either. Almost every family had one or two members move up north. I wonder why? Was it just a matter of one couple moving north and then relatives started following relatives until half the county was there, or had something changed, like jobs shifting from one area to another?

Who would have thought that genealogy would lead to an interest in economic history and migration patterns?

I had a dream last night that I was moving surnames around on a giant sheet of white paper, trying to make them fit together like a crossword puzzle. I'm not sure if that means I've been spending too much time doing this or just the right amount of time. It is like the best puzzle I've ever gotten to do, though.