I started doing genealogy research in the mid-1960s when I discovered a set of family group sheets which had been given to my mother about 10 years earlier by a distant cousin, Lee Tarble. Genealogy has been my primary avocation off-and-on ever since.
My early efforts were spent, as they should have been, collecting stories and information from close relatives. I basically stopped working on my genealogy during my undergraduate years in Champaign-Urbana, but I picked it up again with a vengeance during my law school years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spending many hours at the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s library on Newbury Street in Boston.
When I landed in Chicago in 1977 after graduating from Harvard Law School, the Newberry Library became my new research home. I spent a lot of time there, often stopping in for a hour or two after work on my way from the Loop to my apartment in the Lincoln Park area.
Marriage and family largely supplanted my genealogy efforts during the 1980s and early 1990s, though I continued to pick it up and do research from time to time. By the middle of the 1990s, genealogy started moving to Internet in force, with pioneering sites like RootsWeb and USGenWeb. During the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s, my genealogy research on the Internet took many of my waking hours (including many hours that should have been spent sleeping). During that time, I created a number of genealogy websites on RootsWeb FreePages: