I'm not quite sure how I got hooked on genealogy. I suspect it has to do with being part of a team that I wasn't picked last for.

The juiciest discoveries have come from mom's side. Bushels of staunch New Englanders - Plymouth connections, cast-out Rhode Island Baptists and Quakers, plus flinty Welsh, Scots and Scots-Irish, and truly oddball Germans.

The Paternal-side lines offer up more Puritans, Quakers, Staten Island Loyalists, Sudeten-Germans, and the two truly Ireland-Irish branches in my tree: one, a young family escaping famine and; two, an early Colonial Governor of New York whose royal lineage goes back to Charlemagne. (But seriously - don't they all?)

The photo is of me in the grand old Mountain View Cemetery here in Oakland. I'm standing in the Watson section of Plot #1, which houses the families of two brothers of my 3rd Great-Grandfather. Three brothers moved out here from Saratoga County, NY in the 1850s, and all three got up to their knees in the various businesses of Horace W Carpentier, the "colorful" first Mayor of Oakland.

I'm not quite sure how I got hooked on genealogy. I suspect it has to do with being part of a team that I wasn't picked last for.

The juiciest discoveries have come from mom's side. Bushels of staunch New Englanders - Plymouth connections, cast-out Rhode Island Baptists and Quakers, plus flinty Welsh, Scots and Scots-Irish, and truly oddball Germans.

The Paternal-side lines offer up more Puritans, Quakers, Staten Island Loyalists, Sudeten-Germans, and the two truly Ireland-Irish branches in my tree: one, a young family escaping famine and; two, an early Colonial Governor of New York whose royal lineage goes back to Charlemagne. (But seriously - don't they all?)

The photo is of me in the grand old Mountain View Cemetery here in Oakland. I'm standing in the Watson section of Plot #1, which houses the families of two brothers of my 3rd Great-Grandfather. Three brothers moved out here from Saratoga County, NY in the 1850s, and all three got up to their knees in the various businesses of Horace W Carpentier, the "colorful" first Mayor of Oakland.