Haunting cemeteries must be in the blood. My Mom and Aunt and their Mom always wanted to go visit the cemeteries and tell stories about the people buried there. I remember loving to listen to the stories and as an adult, I enjoyed taking them to the cemeteried to visit family graves and trying to take pictures and write notes. I wish I had done a better job and recorded some of those conversations.

These visits and stories made me really want to build out our family trees. My aunt and a few others in the family had compiled family histories and given copies of their work to me. My husband's family had some information compiled as well. This information was my starting point.

As I have built out the family trees, I have tried to include pictures of the graves along with stories about the person (if known). The internet is a wonderful resource for data, but determining some relationships can be very tricky. Census,Bible entries, church records, deeds, wills, grants are all wonderful for making connections. Find a grave has been very helpful as well. Example: My dad's mom never talked much about her mother's family. We never visited anyone from that family and to this day I've never met anyone from her Mom's side (Forrester and Johnson). After my Grandmother had passed, I was looking through her Bible. She had flowers, and news paper clippings scattered throughout. I came across one about a Forrester and Googled his name and birth & death dates. Boom! There he was on Findagrave.com! The real kicker was that he was buried in a Catholic cemetery. As I looked at that cemetery, I learned her whole family was Catholic. So, my G.Grandma Forrester-Pinkerton had been raised a Catholic. But, I remember my Grandma Pinkerton-Babb talking about going to the country church which was Baptist ( I have her hymnal). I have to wonder if there was a rift in the family as she didn't marry a Catholic.

One other driving force in my Ancestry Quest is to solve the mystery of finding my "Indian" GGG-Grandmother, whom my dad and his dad and his dad before have told about. Supposedly she was from the Miami nation in the Pinville, Indiana area. But, my dad said he went to school with the son of the Miami Chief and they checked their tribal records and found no info of a Babb male marrying one of their women. The chief's son told my dad that there were some Cherokee "Trail of Tears" escapees who the Indiana tribes took in, but they were not entered into the records of the tribe. So, then I did the DNA. No luck there. But, have been told that the information of the DNA is not conclusive as we are descended from a female Native American and something about the DNA of the male was needed. Don't know at this point. My dad and his dad had the features and dark skin as do I. The DNA did show a bit of southern Meditteranian areas, so perhaps that is it. Still a mystery and still looking. This is an addictive hobby!

Haunting cemeteries must be in the blood. My Mom and Aunt and their Mom always wanted to go visit the cemeteries and tell stories about the people buried there. I remember loving to listen to the stories and as an adult, I enjoyed taking them to the cemeteried to visit family graves and trying to take pictures and write notes. I wish I had done a better job and recorded some of those conversations.

These visits and stories made me really want to build out our family trees. My aunt and a few others in the family had compiled family histories and given copies of their work to me. My husband's family had some information compiled as well. This information was my starting point.

As I have built out the family trees, I have tried to include pictures of the graves along with stories about the person (if known). The internet is a wonderful resource for data, but determining some relationships can be very tricky. Census,Bible entries, church records, deeds, wills, grants are all wonderful for making connections. Find a grave has been very helpful as well. Example: My dad's mom never talked much about her mother's family. We never visited anyone from that family and to this day I've never met anyone from her Mom's side (Forrester and Johnson). After my Grandmother had passed, I was looking through her Bible. She had flowers, and news paper clippings scattered throughout. I came across one about a Forrester and Googled his name and birth & death dates. Boom! There he was on Findagrave.com! The real kicker was that he was buried in a Catholic cemetery. As I looked at that cemetery, I learned her whole family was Catholic. So, my G.Grandma Forrester-Pinkerton had been raised a Catholic. But, I remember my Grandma Pinkerton-Babb talking about going to the country church which was Baptist ( I have her hymnal). I have to wonder if there was a rift in the family as she didn't marry a Catholic.

One other driving force in my Ancestry Quest is to solve the mystery of finding my "Indian" GGG-Grandmother, whom my dad and his dad and his dad before have told about. Supposedly she was from the Miami nation in the Pinville, Indiana area. But, my dad said he went to school with the son of the Miami Chief and they checked their tribal records and found no info of a Babb male marrying one of their women. The chief's son told my dad that there were some Cherokee "Trail of Tears" escapees who the Indiana tribes took in, but they were not entered into the records of the tribe. So, then I did the DNA. No luck there. But, have been told that the information of the DNA is not conclusive as we are descended from a female Native American and something about the DNA of the male was needed. Don't know at this point. My dad and his dad had the features and dark skin as do I. The DNA did show a bit of southern Meditteranian areas, so perhaps that is it. Still a mystery and still looking. This is an addictive hobby!