There was a good article by Susan Dibble printed in the February 24, 2011 edition of the Daily Herald about my friend, Jeff Bockman. It was quite a write-up. Following is just a teaser.
Genealogy author and speaker Jeff Bockman doesn’t expect everyone to spend years
researching their family history as he has done.
But he does encourage everyone to save, preserve and identify family records and photos already in their hands or readily available to them.
“Once you find what you don’t know about the family, curiosity kind of takes over,” he said.…
As Bockman tells the story, it was his son’s sixth-grade homework assignment that got him started. He was getting his twin sons off to bed one night 24 years ago when one of them said he needed to list four great-grandparents for class.
“It only took me 20-some years to complete his homework assignment,” he said.
Bockman looked back to genealogical research one of his grandmothers had done only to find she apparently had embellished the family tree.
He faced immediate challenges in learning about the two grandfathers he had never known. His paternal grandfather had deserted his wife and four small children, so she destroyed his photos and never spoke of him again.
Bockman later was able to confirm family stories that his grandfather had been born in Nicaragua of Danish parents and that his great-grandfather had owned a banana plantation.
