“How did you get started?”

“What made you become interested?”

“Why do you spend all day in a cemetery?”

It doesn’t matter much how delicately or abruptly the question is asked, the point is someone always asks how I got started doing genealogy. Be it one genealogist to another or an “ordinary” person to one of us family history fanatics, it is an expected and accepted part of conversation. It is not a dreaded question or one that is hard to answer. In fact, I think it is a story most of us like to tell. For me, it began in a graveyard.

The place where most lives end is the place where mine really began. I was not quite 14 years old when Andrew and Rhoda Buchanan seem to have decided they had waited long enough. Six generations and a handful more of years, apparently the impromptu birthday hike that brought me to Green Mount cemetery for the first time, was more of a coming of age event than I had ever intended.

In search of the Martin mausoleum, which houses the painting of the lady with the moving eyes, a legend to local kids, I made my first trip ever into Green Mount. I went looking for ghosts, and depending on your definition, I guess I may have found them, though not as I had imagined.

BUCHANAN. The way your own name can jump out at you is an interesting thing. Unintentionally you see it in a news article as if it had been highlighted just for you, or you hear it in someone else’s conversation as if it had been the only word spoken in a language you understood. In my case, I don’t remember any other names I saw in the cemetery that day, it was as if only the Buchanan stones had been carved.

Once I found them, I had to know. Know everything about them. It didn’t take long for other names to begin popping out at me too. As my research grew more extensive, I felt like every stone was waiting for me to give its inscription due attention. Today, I am pressed to find someone buried there that I don’t feel responsible to.

The pressure of genealogy is not a burden. It is an incredibly fulfilling search that brings the past to the present one person at a time. I cannot speak for every genealogist. Some people research out of plain curiosity, some do it because it is exciting (and it is!). I research for both of those reasons, but also because every relative I find, no matter how recent or how long ago, becomes dear to me.

I know I had a part in pulling that person’s life back together fact by fact, and I played a part to make sure their contributions back then, to my life right now, are not forgotten or dismissed. I gave them respect and most importantly I remembered. Hopefully, through my work not only will I remember, but others who see the results of the search will remember too.

I am a historian by education and choice. Genealogy to me is vital, integral, amazing, and you know what, it’s just plain fun. Learning who you are and what incredible things your relatives did, well, there is nothing like it. Stone carvers, teachers, blacksmiths, seamstresses, farmers, preachers, lawmakers, parents, providers, friends – don’t you want to know who they were? What they did? For genealogists, it is a burning need to know.

Your first cousin twice removed didn’t have to play a pivotal role in the invention of the four-wheel drive, but if he did, wouldn’t that be something to know? Your great-great-grandmother might have been a graduate in the first class of Waynesburg College in 1852, in which case her photo might be sitting in the college museum, well identified and just waiting for you to come see.

My great-great-grandfather was a farmer in Franklin Township. All I know about him is that he was kind and loving enough to take care of his disabled older brother until his death, and that in 1875 he discovered a den of skunks and earned himself $10 for the pelts! An ancestor did not have to be General Washington to be worth remembering. If it weren’t for them we wouldn’t be here.

One day that need to know will probably sneak up on you. For most people it does. When the time comes, there will be microfilmed newspaper articles to tell you about random skunk discoveries in addition to obituaries and marriage announcements. Maybe you’ll find courthouse records revealing a Lunacy Docket entry or two, as well as how inheritances were distributed and lands purchased by the family; and, of course, there will be the tombstones showing us where to stand in reverie. Or if you’re like me, to be called to service.