Vee L. Housman wrote: > (snip) > But, nonetheless, what a 15-year-old girl wrote for an English > assignment 50 years ago is now the only documented history of John > William Riley that the family has! What a wonderful story about Uncle Will. The part about your writing it in the first place as a school assignment reminds me of how I got started on this genealogy stuff in the first place. My niece was given virtually the same assignment for a college course last year (does this say something about changes in education levels? - never mind, that is another subject). She started by asking my father, who is 90, for a brief account of the facts of his life that she could use for the assignment. He wrote it and she used it and also got 100%. But then he decided the brief account did not satisfy him so he started expanding it into an autobiography, now about 120 pages and counting. I got involved by offering to put it in a word processor for him. I did that, and then I started thinking wouldn't it be nice to have some family trees for an appendix, but I didn't have enough information, so I started collecting more of it and one thing led to another, and here I am. But. It is only his father's family that is PaDutch; his mother's is, I don't know, English origin I suppose, and I am getting in over my head and lost in what is for an Easterner like me the howling wilderness of the Midwest, Ohio and westward. It seems his maternal grandmother had three husbands (outlived them all) and in trying to trace the sequence of events - the questions I asked reminded Dad of things - we are now all the way out in Bleeding Kansas with John Brown. Literally; it seems my greatgrandmother knew the old maniac personally and claimed to have repaired his trousers on one occasion. Don't ask me exactly how well she knew him; that is all I know so far. Apparently most of them came back to Pennsylvania, where they had started from, eventually. Do others have stories of how they got involved in genealogy? -- jan <janiceaf@ix.netcom.com> Interested in names: FRANK, KELLER, PENROSE, SCHULTZ