Every family has a story to tell, and there is always a story teller in every family. My favorite past time as a child was to sit on my grandpa's lap in his old recliner and listen to him tell me stories of when he was a kid.

I am very happy that I listened and I am very thankful for all the family questions that I asked. My Great Aunt Barb whom is my favorite Aunt, taught me how to do genealogy and has been my partner in crime for over 8 years. I have recently in the last year started to develop close relationships with cousins and we work together sharing information. Each one of us has a specific job concerning the genealogy that we are good at. I am the gopher, I can find just about anything, I then send it to a cousin who puts it in order who the sends it to a cousin who puts it all onto a disk and passes it around to all the other family members. It is a great way to work, and get a ton of stuff done.

Anyway back to "stories", you can not always count on the stories passed down from generation to generation. Over time they get added to and then information gets left out and by the time it gets told down three or four generations it is unpredictable as to what part is true or false. Relying on these stories can create a nightmare when researching. Start with what you know for fact by using verifiable documents such as Birth Certificates, Death Certificates, Marriage Licenses, War Cards, Baptismal Records, Immigration Records, Historical Records, ECT.

That will provide a solid foundation. Make contacts with living relatives and ask to share information, I have done this some many times and gained invaluable information and photos. It is well worth the time, and you would be amazed at the bond that you will develop with some of these long lost cousins.

I hope we can get a good group of people together here, and work on a larger scale on the following lines:

Parker, Falkner/Faulkner, Sharp, Loy/Ley, Nevinger/Novinger, Cassel/Castle, Brower, Notestine/Notestein, Black/Swartz, Endinger/Eninger, Kruckeberg/Krueckeberg, Madden, Stufflebeam, Phillips, and many others.