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I was born in Indiana, as were my children, my parents, all of my grandparents, and most of my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, which, of course, has a lot to do with the name of this site! I have lived in Indiana all of my life, almost all of which has been in the same house.

I have been married for over twenty-five years; we are the proud parents of three children, a daughter with a degree in Legal Studies, a son in the Air Force, and our youngest, an avid tuba player and civil engineer to-be.

By day I am a manager of IT for a global chemical manufacturing company; by night I stay busy with being a wife, mother, and youth volunteer. In past years I was consumed with working with Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Sunday School, and the PTO. As the children are growing up these activities are easing off, leaving 4-H as my remaining major youth volunteer activity. While I am involved in several aspects of 4-H, my heart belongs to the Dog Agility project.

In my “free time” I work on the endless task of remolding our home, continue my family research, read (a novel occasionally, but more likely a genealogy or computer magazine), camp, and work on this website. I also edit a family newsletter “Keeping Up with the Joneses” – started by my mother almost 25 years ago it has helped bind the descendents of my grandparents into a tight family as we have kept up with each other no matter were our moves have taken us around the world. I would like to think in future years I will return to some previous interests such as quilting, sewing, needlework, gardening, and bicycling.

I had a mild interest in family history since my early adult years, but became really bitten by “the bug” in the early 90s. I was quite proud of myself in “the early years” for having the “foresight of future growth” to allocate FOUR file folders to the papers I acquired even though the material at that time would have fit into a single folder. Once I started researching in earnest I quickly expanded into a filing box, then to four drawers of a file cabinet, and am now hurtling in the direction that I assume will take me to four cabinets some day. I am seriously considering digitizing portions of easily re-retrievable documents in an effort to confine myself to a couple rooms of the house.

I was lucky. I became an addict of the pursuit at about the same time the pre-Internet sites such as CompuServe and Prodigy were coming of age. While in those days there was very little in the way of digitized documents or online transcriptions, the ability to connect with distant cousins engaged in the same research was groundbreaking. My aunt who had spent many years piecing together tidbits (to whom I am MUCH indebted and very grateful for not only the trail she blazed but the oral history she salvaged) was overwhelmed at some of her brick walls I was able to break down through fortuitous contacts. Not only were we able to push our heritage back by generations, but we made contacts and found new information which help construct rich stories of many of those who came before us.

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About the Author, Debbie Wesley