At a Thanksgiving dinner about twenty-five years ago, my grandmother, Lillian Rodsky Richling, turned to my mother-in-law, Elinor Payne Newman, and asked “Elinor, where did your people come from?”  Elinor replied, “I don’t know; they’ve always been here.”  And that’s how it began.

When I discovered I was adopted over thirty years ago (I am an LDA – late-discovery adoptee – but that’s a subject for another day), I attended several adoption support group meetings.  As it turned out, the focus of most of the meetings was search and reunion – desperate adoptees searching for their birth parents and birth parents searching for the children they had relinquished.  I had already been reunited with my birth family, so the topic became strictly academic for me.  I learned several rudimentary techniques for researching one’s background and the challenge of putting all the pieces together was exhilarating to me.  I was almost disappointed that I didn’t need to search.  But, then, Lillian asked THE question…

My husband was always curious about his background.  His name is Demarest Stephen Newman, Jr., obviously named after his father, Demarest Stephen Newman, Sr.  Demarest Sr. was named after HIS father, Everett Demarest Newman.  And that’s all he knew.  He grew up in a small town in Monmouth County, New Jersey, Highlands, where everyone knew everyone else.  Even so, this was going to be a challenge as, unfortunately, Everett died when Demarest Sr. was only three years old and Mrs. Newman quickly remarried and the ties to the Newman family became frayed.  So, where did the name “Demarest” come from?  There’s a town in New Jersey named Demarest; were we related?  Demarest is quite a distance from Highlands, but maybe…..

Then there was Demarest’s mother’s side.  Elinor was born in Vermont.  She was one of six siblings and she also had three older half-sisters.  Her mother had been married to someone else before she wed Elinor’s dad.  In those days, we were skiing a lot in Vermont and also visiting with Elinor’s brother and sister-in-law, Cleo and Gwen Payne, of South Pomfret, quite close to Killington, conveniently.  They told me just enough about the family to whet my appetite for further research.

So, the die was cast and I jumped into genealogy with both feet.  I joined every genealogical organization I could think of, The National Genealogical Society, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Jewish Genealogical Society of New York, Monmouth County Historical Society, Monmouth County Genealogy Society.  I subscribed to numerous publications and pored over them religiously.  I haunted the Genealogy section of Barnes and Noble and bought anything I could get my hands on.  I visited Town Halls in every town we visited and I wandered among tombstones in remote graveyards.  I cast a wide net and accumulated tons of information and any document I thought MIGHT prove a connection somewhere down the line.  I filled binders and binders (not with women, Mitt Romney) but with birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates, pedigree charts, ahnentafel charts, written notes, wills and deeds.  The paper was becoming overwhelming.  Then came the internet.

My daughter had just entered Kindergarten, so as to give her a head start (I told myself) I made my first computer purchase.  Then came the subscriptions…Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe, remember them?  Broderbund Software offered a genealogy program, Family Tree Maker, along with disk after disk of user-submitted family trees as well as digitized versions of reference materials, especially pertaining to early New England families.  I was in heaven.

The Kindergartener is now 27 years old and genealogy has come a long way since then.  I still have loads and loads of information and documents, but they’re mostly scanned and saved to my various family trees on Ancestry.com.  Sometimes family members ask me to summarize the family tree as it relates to them and it’s almost impossible to do so.  I decided to start this blog as a way of organizing my thoughts – as well as my research – and to allow family to see the ancestors they’re interested in.  So please bear with me as I become used to this format.  And, of course, I’m always open to your comments and suggestions.