I'm heading to Boston and Maine in by the end of this month to do on-the-ground research for my Wilson book. Trying to prepare for this trip is turning out to be a race against time – unexpected for sure!

Though I'll be there for weeks, I will need to spend my time doing research and not writing it all up. In order to know what to research, however, I have to have done research and writing to find out what to research. Of course, it turns out that I have less time now to devote to that than I have had in the past. My web business is booming and I'm staying busier than I thought possible right now. Timing is everything and as usual life forces driving that timing just aren't cooperating!

So making lists and doing what I can before I leave. I spent a wonderful afternoon with a very distant cousin recently. Now when I talk about distant cousins, I'm really talking distant!  He's my 7th cousin once removed, a descendant of Edward Paul Dyer of Maine and Virginia. We met up in the mountains at Graves Mountain Lodge, visited a local cemetery and his old "homeplace", a cabin still standing next to a noisy babbling brook up next to the Shenandoah Park boundary. 

What I found was that it was easy to get captivated by simply the "ambience" of the location. It's gorgeous up there but not only that, I fell under the spell of history, imagining what it would be like to be living in that cabin without electricity or plumbing back in the 1860s like Edward Dyer or the 1940s/1950s like when Roy lived there. It's hard to describe how I felt and as I pulled out my phone to take a picture, I said, "I've got to capture this." 

Thus the pics you see here. The closeup of the cabin combined with the long view with the mountain backdrop may help you see what I mean. It certainly helps to remind me that the human story behind a family genealogy has so much more to it than just dates and family facts. 

This is why I'm heading to New England  – to put myself in that same place these people walked and lived, to get a feel for what it's really like. So I'm going to be looking for cemeteries, photographing graves, digging through old records, talking to cousins and soaking up that which is New England.

 Genealogists aren't required to do that. Writers doing genealogy are. 

I also must remember to not get caught up in all of that and not get that research done. Hmm, gee, well, I guess I won't mind having to go back again later!