Saturday Night Fun Who Do You Blame?

Hey geneaphiles - it's Saturday Night, time for more Genealogy Fun for all Genea-Musing readers.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (and we need more of you to do this, otherwise it may end...), is to:

1) Read Brenda Joyce Jerome's post Who or What Do You Blame? on the Western Kentucky Genealogy blog. She asks these questions:

* Can you identify person or event that started you on this search for family information?

* Did you pick up researching where a relative had left off?

* Did your interest stem from your child's school project on genealogy?

* If you have been researching many years, it may be hard to pinpoint one reason for this journey.

Well it is pretty easy, my sister Jacque decided we needed to have a Hansen family reunion and asked all our cousins to send us addresses of any Hansen relatives they knew. We sent out a letter asking if any on this group would be interested in a reunion? Almost everyone said yes, and one lady Lorraine Erickson (a Family History Center volunteer) sent us some group sheets on our family and some blank ones to put in the next mailing, so we did and set a date. We got back 350 filled in group sheets, which I still have, but like all novice genealogists I did not label who sent which group sheet, so I have little or no sources for the first 500+ names in my genealogy database. So in 1990 we had the first of several Hansen reunions. Great fun, and after it was over we wanted to learn more on our family so Jacque & I took a beginning genealogy class at our community college evening class and so I was able to extend the research Lorraine Erickson had done back 4 or 5 more generations and we also found 5 more brothers and sisters for the five Hansen's that came from Denmark to Austin, Minnesota in the 1880s and 1890s.

Never had any genealogy classes or assignments in school.