Family History Realization

So after a lesson on Family History I realized that I didn't know any stories about my ancestor and so I emailed my relatives to ask their help in collecting some stories. Then as I was looking over the info from pedigree charts I started to analyze the dates to see how old they were when they married and how old they were when they died and how many kids they had and such and then I decided to write up a little about each family from what I learned just from dates and locations. So based on this information:



I learned this about them:
John was born in Pennsylvania and Eliza was born in Scotland. They were married in Nephi, UT. She turned 16 a few months before she was married in Nov, 4, 1860 and John was 20. All of their children were born in Nephi, UT. So they must have been with the Saints on their move west (Feb 1846-July1847). If so, John would have been 6 or so when they trekked and Eliza would have been 3 years old. Eliza’s father died in Scotland in 1847. Eliza’s mother died in 1876, and she died in Utah. So this widowed mother may have come over from Scotland alone with her children. John’s parents had 9 children, 7 of which were born in Pennsylvania and 2 born in Salt Lake. The first child born in Salt Lake was born June of 1848, so John’s family must have moved at the time the Saints did.
Eliza was 17 when she had her first child. She then had 8 children over the next 17 years. Each child separated from slightly less then 2 year to 3 years. She was 34 when she stopped having children and then died three years later at the age of 37. The children she would have left at home would have been ages, 3, 5, 11,13, 15, 18 (Susan Elizabeth Sidwell), and 20. (The 3rd child died at 3 and a half years of age, a year and 4 months before the birth of their 4th child, would have been age 8 at mothers death.) All her children lived to be around 70-80 years old (1940-1958). John was 41 when she died and lived another 23 years after her death, dying at the age of 74.
The eldest son was married 3 years after Eliza’s death and the 2nd child, Susan Elizabeth, was married 5 years later.


So I learned that even if you don't have journals or any recorded history about your ancestors you can learn a lot about them and "connect" with them just by analyzing the details from pedigree charts. It really made these names and people come alive to me. And it's addicting. I just keep going back further and looking up where they used to live on google maps. I haven't done this yet but you can research about the places they lived and what it was like when they lived there on google. So if you think there isn't anything you can do with genealogy because it 'seems like it's all been done' (that's how I feel before) you can learn more about them because one day we are going to meet them and it will be nice to know a little bit about them. I think that feeling a connection with your ancestors is also a part of 'turning the hearts of the father's to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers'.