Introduction.

Hey everyone, I decided to start a blog. Hopefully I will have the tenacity to keep it up.

My name is Andrea, I'm 19 years old, and I am currently a junior at the University of Washington. I will be getting two degrees, a B.A. in Medical Anthropology & a B.S. in Public Health. The extra degree is going to take me an extra year so I will be graduating in 2012. I am planning on getting my master's in Epidemiology.

I like genealogy. Even as a little kid I would run around interviewing my older relatives about what their childhoods were like and stuff like that. I recently ran across something that I thought was kind of cute:


It was a genealogy book that I had filled out circa age 9, haha.

I have been seriously researching for about two years now. Genealogy takes up a good amount of my spare time (not to mention my spare money!). I imagine a good amount of my posts will be about my relatives & ancestors, hence the blog name.

My other interests....hmm, I was checking amazon.com this morning and discovered that they know me better than I know myself.


Yes, I like all of this stuff. Thanks, amazon.


Here's a pic of me at my great-great grandparent's headstone (Charles Schmidt & Lizzie Graffenberger). They are buried at the Toledo Cemetery in Toledo, Washington. Their grave was easy to find because it was the biggest in the entire cemetery --- apparently they were quite wealthy. You can kind of see it towering over the other headstones.

My father's ancestors are overwhelmingly of English origin, with a bit of Irish & Scottish mixed in, and for the most part they have been in the United States since colonial times, gradually migrating west. My great-great-great grandparents were born in the East --- mainly Virginia & New Hampshire. Then their children were born pretty much in Illinois or Indiana. My grandparents eventually made it to Washington from South Dakota and settled near Seattle, where I live now.

My mother's ancestors are a bit more of a mixed bag. Quite a few of her paternal ancestors were born in Scotland & Ireland, and then spent some time in Canada before immigrating to the U.S. Her maternal grandmother was born in England and immigrated to the United States as a child. Her maternal grandfather was born in the United States, but his parents immigrated from Germany. So in general, her ancestors have immigrated to the United States much more recently than my father's ancestors.

Okay, I will write more later.