As I write this, I’m going to go to what I’d call a “history-adjacent” conference at which I’m likely to run into far more non-genealogists than at the gatherings I normally attend.

Which got me to seriously thinking about why I do this.

“This” meaning genealogy.

While it’s not the first time in the 40-plus years of mucking around graveyards, courthouses, and all over the Internet that I’ve tackled the “why” question, I realize that a lot of my time is spent just doing, not thinking about an overarching plan.

I’ve told the tale more than once about my first foray into genealogy.

I was helping my mother write and edit a 250th anniversary history book of what was then my church home, Bern Reformed United Church of Christ in Berks County, Pennsylvania. In that process, whenever there was a building committee or list of church elders, we kept coming across the surnames of people who matched the maiden names of the wives in the single ancestral line for which an immigrant ancestor had been proven.

It was merely this single curiosity that motivated me to take a drive down to the historic old graveyard of the church and “see if I can find anything about more of these people.”

And I was only on that graveyard a few minutes before I found the tombstone of Peter Kerschner, the father of one of those wives.

And what a detailed tombstone it was, giving not just birth and death years like many modern tombstones but full day-month-year dates, the names of his parents (Philip Kerschne and Susanna Himmelberger) and Peter’s wife (Catharina Bode) and their marriage date, as well as his funeral text for good measure.

And it wasn’t too long before I found Peter’s father Phillip’s stone. No parents were listed on it, but just a couple of graves away was another Peter, this one a Revolutionary War soldier of the write age to be Philip’s father (an estate file later proved them to be father and son).

In a metaphorical sense, I never really came back from graveyard.

However, my genealogical journey did change from that initial curiosity.

I decided that a worthy goal should be to trace all my ancestors back to immigrants. How hard could that be, right?

Well, as it turned out … I’m still working on all that since it turned out that last of my immigrant ancestors to arrive in America was a couple who arrived in the 1830s, with many coming a century before that. At last count, I have more than 70 immigrant lines (it depends on how you count immigrant families who appear more than once in my tree … there are at least a half dozen of those), with the likely final total of more than 100.

Along this path of proving one immigrant family after another–and by “proving” I mean oftentimes by finding someone else had found the proof!–there were a bunch of twists and turns.

We’ll talk about those twists and turns in next week’s “Roots & Branches” column.

Beidler is a freelance writer and lecturer on genealogy. Contact him by e-mail to jamesmbeidler@gmail.com. Like him on Facebook (James M. Beidler).