 |
| Me from the 1993 Tipton Family Reunion |
Today I spent the morning on the phone with Bob Tipton, a distant Tipton relative. We wanted my permission to take a DNA test for our common Tipton family line.
As I have mentioned many times before in this blog, I am very interested in researching my family tree, especially my paternal Tipton line.
The photo above of me was taken at one of the occasional Tipton family reunions held here in southeastern Pennsylvania. Most of the Tiptons in this area are descended from my Tipton grandparents who had eleven sons (no daughters). The photo was a freeze frame on an 8 mm film, thus the blurriness.
Note that the date is 1993. At that time I didn't know anything about my paternal Tipton family line other than the name of my grandfather, Fieldon Jacob Tipton who moved his family of young sons to southeastern Pennsylvania from the mountains of western North Carolina in 1929 to work as cheap farm labor on his brother-in-law's fruit and vegetable farm. My father was ten years old when he arrived in Pennsylvania. Eleven years later he met my Mother, is from old Pennsylvania Quaker stock, and married her. I was their first born son in 1941. Two more sons arrived in subsequent years.
In 1994, my late brother John (he died this past September), was living in South Carolina. He said a co-worker, who often visited his relatives in the western North Carolina mountains and family cemeteries. After one trip he told my brother that he often encountered many Tipton headstones in the cemeteries he visited. Thus began my foray into Tipton family genealogy. The next year, 1994, I made a trip with my brother to those same mountains and discovered much information about my Tipton family history.
 |
| My late brother John and I at the Tipton-Haynes historic site in Johnson City Tennessee 1998, attending another Tipton Family Reunion |
That was the year I began building my family tree, first on Family Tree Maker and later on Ancestry.com.
Since that time I've had intense periods of research and then times that life caught up with me and I had to abandoned my family research.
Well folks, I'm back to researching my Tipton family history. I've always loved doing research. I can literally spend hours researching and building my family tree. I've even built out my maternal branch which is just as interesting as my Tipton family line.
Too often I put off researching but time is catching up with me. My legacy will be what I leave on Ancestry.com about my family research. I have many stories to tell.
I'm telling you all this because you may not see me post as often on this personal blog. I do not intend to stop posting but probably can't just as often. I still am Bill's full-time caregiver which is taking more time these days. Caregiving and running the whole household here at Casa Tipton-Kelly still takes up a lot of my time. Before Bill's strokes, we used to pretty evenly divide the household duties around here. Bill did the handyman work (including electric and plumbing) and I did the cooking, shopping and paying bills. Now I do it all. And frankly folks, it pretty well takes up much of my day. I only have time to write this blog when Bill is sleeping as he is now.
As I mentioned earlier in this post, I spend about two hours on the phone with a Tipton cousin talking about our Tipton family history research. This conversation reinvigorated my interest in doing more research before I leave this planet.
Some have advised me to "take time for myself" when I became a caregiver. And I agree! And there are few things I enjoy more (trips with Pat) than researching my family history. I find it very relaxing and fascinating.
Life goes on folks. Until it doesn't but in the meantime I'm off to a new path.
Have a great day everyone!