Welcome

This is the first entry in my blog.  I want to tell you about who I am and how I came to develop this website.  I was born in Eugene, Oregon and four days later I was adopted.  We lived in Oregon for six months and then left for California.  I started my schooling in the Los Angeles area.  We lived there until I was nine.  We then moved to the Seattle area.  This was quite a shock to me because it was on my 9th birthday, which is in January, when we arrived at our new home and I walked out onto the patio and slipped and cracked my tailbone on the icy surface.  I immediately declared my hatred for our new home.  We lived in the area for 12 years.  I graduated from high school there and began my college education at a local community college and transferred to a state university for a year.  My adoptive parents retired to San Diego and I followed them there.  I finished my college degree there and while working at a Savings & Loan, I began my love of genealogy.

The spark started when my adoptive dad's sister and her husband visited and showed pictures of their trip to Scotland, where they did some genealogy research.  This was in 1987.  Fortunately, someone had already done a lot of research on my adoptive line.  No one had one any on my adoptive mother's line so I started working on her line first.  This was long before the internet.  I didn't even have my own personal computer.  Everything was done by hand and snail mail.  If I wanted to look at census records, I had to drive to the National Archives in Laguna Niguel, about an hour and a half drive north, to look at microfilm rolls.  It was very time-consuming and expensive.

In 1989, I became a flight attendant and a year later I purchased my own computer.  There still wasn't the internet but technology was making research a little less time consuming.  At least now, when I had a layover in a town with a good genealogy library or family, I got research done.

In 1999, I came home from a trip and turned on Headline News to hear a story about the state of Oregon passing a law about opening up their adoption records.  The next day, I put my name on the wait list to receive my original birth certificate.  In the summer of 2000, I finally received that certificate.  Three days later, I got on the internet and looked up the Esgate name in Eugene, Oregon's white pages of their telephone book.  There were six Esgates still living there. I proceeded to call each one, not realizing I was actually related to them all.  The last one turned out to be the most helpful by putting me in contact with my immediate family.

I want this website to not only show my biological family roots but as a means of sharing my genealogy knowledge that I have acquired over the years and perhaps enlighten my visitors.  Therefore, I will discuss what actions I have taken, the results I have found, and topics of genealogical interest.  I want to teach others things I have learned and discovered all these many years.

This blog will be updated on a regular basis as well as the research on my family tree.  If you have information to add or correct, please feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.  All genealogy of living people will not be published on the website but will at least be accounted for privately.  If you want that information, you will have to contact me personally through email.  I look forward to hearing from you.