Of all the topics, getting our families to take interest in our family history research continues to be a struggle for most people. How do you take all the family documents, names, dates, places and stories and put them down into a format that draws in the reader? It is sad to see a lifetime of research, stories and pictures to be destined for a binder that is so heavy you can hardly lift it.

I think that the stories of our families are Better than any Reality Show ever made.

Let’s work together and make a legacy for our families and creatively piece together something that family members will eagerly look through over and over again.

We all have the dream that we will take beautiful pictures of our family, take great care and place them in elaborate books that our family will pour over for years and years to come. We envision that some day we will sit down and capture all the family stories that our parents have been telling us since we were little.

 Who could forget those stories, right?

Then — Bam! – one day we look around and one by one our treasured family leaders seem to be disappearing and now recalling those stories gets harder and harder. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? It’s kind of like that old telephone game where you would whisper a sentence into the person’s ear at the beginning of the line and then they would pass it on to the last person. Only when the last person says the sentence, it was ridiculously different than the original line.

Life gets busy and suddenly we find ourselves with stories left untold and photos that no one remembers who they are and to which family they belong. My mother realized that she would not live forever and took it upon herself to put names to her treasured family heritage photos. I want to be that person that inspires you to break down your family history journey into small steps and get those wonderful stories, large and small, written in a beautiful format.

I’m Michele Kerr, and I would like to be your guide as we take a journey into our pasts and leave a legacy for those who follow.

I believe that we can all find strength and comfort in knowing where we come from and taking a look at the interesting twists and turns that we all have taken that brought us to where we are right now. What “stuff” are you made of?

What is the goal of this site?

My youngest daughter, bless her heart, loved to get tucked in at night. Over the years, they no longer are were long, extended tuck-ins like when she was a young child, but it still was those last few minutes of a usually hectic day when we would get that final connection of the day.

At the grand age of ten, she started to ask me to tell her stories about my childhood. I guess that she had gotten tired of our story time with books and made-up stories! Anyway, I can remember thinking, “Me? I don’t have any story-worthy tales that would be interesting for anyone to hear let alone her!” Turns out that I couldn’t have been more wrong if I had tried. She loved hearing about all the little things that I could muster up from my memory. She still asks for some of her favorite stores to be repeated, especially the one in particular where I was quite embarrassed. I won’t go into it; you can read about it here if you’d like. I think that somehow my stories give her a sense that I, too, was a small girl just finding my way and sometimes even making mistakes.

These stories, even my own love story, is something I want my own kids to know about. They have only known me for a little while. I want them to look at our own family love stories and want to pass them on to their own families.

• Are you with me?
• Ready to explore how you can begin your own family research?
• Or do you have boxes of research and baffled about how you can pull it together into the treasured book that deserves your family’s attention?
• Let’s get started.

Sign up and let’s start at the beginning and take one step at a time together.

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