Family Reunions: Your Family TREE

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Pay Day was very late this month for some reason. Looking at my amount left means that I have some work to do to reach the minimum this month. I actually have been very slow about getting on to myLot this whole month. I’ve been very busy doing other things. I guess that happens to all of us. I will make some time for myLot this week. I have nothing else going on in particular, although I am still working on copying some old photos. I am also in the process of collecting some photos for the purpose of gathering information about my extended family, so I have contacted some of my relatives in other states and asked for what information they have and for some more photos. Happily, I have been successful in finding out quite a lot of information that I didn’t have and they have also promised to send me some more photos. This past week, I counted up my FIRST COUSINS. I have 41 first cousins, counting those on both my father’s side and mother’s side. We have a very large family, as you can see. I wrote down the names of all of my first cousins and then went through all my photo albums to try to find pictures of all of them. There are only a few that I am missing. My father was the youngest of ten children and had an adopted brother, who was his cousin. My mother had 5 sisters. The children of all of my father’s brothers and sisters and my mother’s sisters add up to 41. That’s a lot of first cousins, and most of them have died, so I’m trying to contact their children, which is even more difficult to do. They have scattered across the country, so it’s been a real challenge. When I was much younger, we used to have FAMILY REUNIONS and we took a lot of pictures which I now have since my mother passed away. I have all of her photo albums, so that has helped tremendously. My goal is to copy all of the photos and put them on a disc, so that I can upload them. I go to the Target Store to do that. They have the scanner and copier. It costs 25 cents per print, so I only do a few each week. Besides, it’s very time consuming and hurts my back to lean over the counter and scan, crop, enlarge and enhance each photo. The last time I went, I was there for three hours to do 59 photos. My back was screaming when I finished and I had to lay down when I got home. I still have more photos to do, so I’m hoping to get the rest of them done this week and then step two will be organizing them into a photo album and labeling all the photos with names and dates. My next step is to go on Ancestry.com and upload some of the photos to our family TREE. I have a third cousin who has already set all of this up and has done quite a bit of research toward filling in all the information. I told her that I would help her but it has become quite a project for me and has kept me very busy. She was delighted when she found out that I have all of these photos which she didn’t have. How many first cousins do you have? Do you have a large family and do you keep in touch with them?