You Know You Are A Genealogist When

You Know You’re An Addicted Genealogist When…

• When you brake for libraries.
• When you get locked in the library overnight and you never even notice.
• When you hyperventilate at the sight of an old cemetery.
• If you’d rather browse in a cemetery than a shopping mall.
• When you think every home should have a microfilm reader.
• When you’ll fast two days a week so you can afford a subscription to Ancestry.
• If you’d rather read census schedules than a good book.
• When you know the town clerk in every county by name.
• If town clerks lock the door when they see you coming.
• You ask for copies of birth, marriage or death certificates for Christmas.
• When you are more interested in what happened in 1797 than 1997.
• If you store your clothing under the bed and your closet is carefully stacked with notebooks and journals.
• If you can pinpoint Kirkcaldy and Inverness on a map but you’re still not sure if Whitehorse is in the Yukon or Washington in DC.
• When all your correspondence begins "Dear Cousin".
• If you’ve traced your ancestral lines back to Adam and Eve, have it fully documented, and still don’t want to quit.
• You have at least two genealogy related blogs.
• You know more cousins through Internet genealogy contacts than have lived in your family in the last century.
• You have more Internet browser bookmarks for genealogy sites than all of your other bookmarks combined.
• You read more words every week from Myrtle, Dick, Randy and Thomas than in the new book in your latest Kindle purchase.
• If you have already booked flights and rooms for the RootsTech conference next year.
• When stripes are worn across the face of your iPad due to the number of times you have reread the past issues of Shades of the Departed Magazine.
• You have at least three genealogy related email accounts.
• You have “I Love Genealogy” written somewhere on your clothing, accessories or body.

Murphy’s Law of Genealogy

• The public ceremony in which your distinguished ancestor participated and at which the platform collapsed under him turned out to be a hanging.
• When at last after much hard work you have solved the mystery you have been working on for two years, your aunt says, "I could have told you that"
• You grandmother’s maiden name for which you have searched for four years was on a letter in a box in the attic all the time.
• You never asked your father about his family when he was alive because you weren’t interested in genealogy then.
• The will you need is in the safe on board the Titanic.
• Copies of old newspapers have holes occurring only on the surnames.
• John, son of Thomas, the immigrant whom your relatives claim as the family progenitor, died on board ship at age 10.
• Your gr-grandfather’s newspaper obituary states that he died leaving no issue of record.
• The keeper of the vital records you need has just been insulted by another genealogist.
• The relative who had all the family photographs gave them all to her daughter who has no interest in genealogy and no inclination to share.
• The only record you find for your gr grandfather is that his property was sold at a sheriff’s sale for insolvency.
• The one document that would supply the missing link in your dead-end line has been lost due to fire, flood or war.
• The town clerk to whom you wrote for the information sends you a long handwritten letter, which is totally illegible.
• The spelling for your European ancestor’s name bears no relationship to its current spelling or pronunciation.
• None of the pictures in your recently deceased grandmother’s photo album have names written on them.
• No one in your family tree ever did anything noteworthy, owned property, was sued or was named in wills.
• You learn that your great aunt’s executor just sold her life’s collection of family genealogical materials to a flea market dealer "somewhere in New York City"
• Ink fades and paper deteriorates at a rate inversely proportional to the value of the data recorded.
• The 37 volume, sixteen thousand page history of your county of origin isn’t indexed.
• You finally find your gr grandparent’s wedding records and discover that the brides’ father was named John Smith.