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It was a day amateur genealogists like me dream of. My father-in-law’s family sent him a couple of tubes filled with documents and notes about both sides of his family. Most of this was information I had been unable to find in my searches in the known databases. So I had a blast reading through it all, and taking my first document photographs. I was sure glad I had my husband’s 6 megapixel Fuji, since even though my camera takes very nice pictures, I would not be able to see the details with its 2.1 megapixels.

This particular document is the marriage certificate of my FIL’s paternal grandparents, over 100 years old. There were baptismal and confirmation certificates, notes people had written down over the years, a death certificate, and a family tree chart started by my FIL’s mother.

One of the neatest sheets, though, is a story of how his great-grandparents came to America from Eastern Europe with his grandmother, then 8 years old, after their other 6 children had died of cholera. It tells of how they traveled across Europe, earning money as they went, then bought passage to America for several hundred dollars. They landed in Baltimore with 25 cents. The story continues with how they lived, moving across the country, then settling in Michigan. They had five more children, many of whose descendents still live within fifty miles of the original home.