Why I blog and who's behind those Foster Grants?

I suppose the question is more do I blog, rather than why. I've been otherwise engaged for several weeks and my goals for this year have been shot full of holes. Still, I've been inching back toward my piles of geneastuff, reviewing my DNA results at 23andMe and catching up on some blog reading. Kathy Reed at Family Matters posted a wonderful piece reflecting on blogging and awards that got me thinking about the whys of blogging.

I began blogging for the glaringly obvious reason that I have some things to say about the families I've been researching for more than thirty years. Some posts have been written to correct mistaken family trees and histories metastasizing throughout internet. Some are cousin bait (I do so love that phrase), though more are aimed at the family I know than those I've yet to meet. Most posts have simply been an effort to share what has fascinated me about my kinfolk with anyone who might care.

Two photographs I consciously look at every day are of my mother and great-aunt (in a location familiar to most family historians) and of a cousin I met when visiting Berezovo, the village where my grandfather was born.

Mary Kathryn Sawyer McKenzie and Mother c. 1990

Researching is so ingrained a part of my being that I expected to find a genetic link in my DNA results, perhaps on the 15th chromosome near the snp that says I'm a fast metabolizer of caffeine. I'm definitely a carrier. I feel an obligation to preserve and present the work done by my aunts, parents and grandmothers. The photo of Mother and Mary Kathryn encourages me. I'm a big fan of the sunglasses, too.

Paternal cousin, 1992

My cousin knew my grandfather before he left Berezovo, knew the man he was before he became defined by immigration. I look at her photograph, sitting in her daughter's home in the Ukraine with her rosy cheeked great-granddaughter peeking from the doorway, and know that I want my children to have a sense of the world my grandparents left. They never heard the accented voices I heard, never celebrated a traditional Easter, never smelled the incense and heard the music of the liturgies. I blog to preserve the fragments I know, to present the fragments I find.

For a happily solitary person (hermit and antisocial are other words that come to mind) I'm finding the social aspects of blogging engaging.  When I began I saw no reason to share any information about myself - including my name. But I have come to "know" other bloggers as I read their posts, to care about them and the families they write about with such love, laughter and even acerbity.

I've spent several days mulling over anonymity as even my blog title went AWOL for a time. I am sharing my name and genetic information with complete strangers - at times it feels I'm standing on street corners tossing it to the winds. It seems absurd to hide behind Nolichucky Roots any longer - and it's such a mouthful. Especially when compared to Susan Clark (curtsying and saying how 'de do).