I began researching my own family history over thirty years ago when I was a young wife and mother. As I started having children, I began wondering about my father's family. He had died when I was three years old, and I knew very little about him - basically just the names and dates of birth and death of my paternal grandparents. I felt a huge void, and I wanted to fill it, if not just for my sake but for my own four daughters.
In those days, genealogy was a painstaking hobby. You would send a letter or request a document, and then wait for a response days, weeks or even months later. You'd get a reply and then look for leads within that reply for the next question. A few years after I began, I was lucky enough to connect with a researcher who worked with me to connect my puzzle pieces to his, and in one instant, I was carried back to 1635, and the first Wakefield who came to the United States on the ship 'America'. I remember literally shaking with excitement and awe to receive the knowledge I had sought for years.
Those feelings of awe are what drove me to start Family Branches. My philosophy regarding Genealogy, is that we have to know where we came from to know who we are. I have done a bit of traveling to find ancestors. Once I stood on a ridge in Tennessee, overlooking the land where my third great-grandfather, Henry Wakefield, once lived. I wondered if the trees I saw had been planted by him. I wondered what he would think if he knew that, a hundred and fifty years after his death, his descendant would want to pick up the threads of continuity and weave them into the tapestry of her own life.
Dawn Wakefield Sullivan
www.familybranchesresearch.com
