Peace and Passion in Genealogy

"Genealogy is not supposed to be peaceful, it is supposed to be a passion,", or so the thought sometimes goes. In fact it can be both,

This past week I received an email from FamilySearch.org That is not unusual, but this one grabbed my attention, when it listed newly added records.

France, Haute-Garonne, Parish and Civil Registration, 8,987,942 records

I lived in that area, in the city of Toulouse for 10 months as a missionary in 1966-1967 and I have many choice memories of the time I lived there and people I knew.

But I was not interested in these records for that reason, but because I have been searching for the ancestors of Hermione Tapiau Blain for 20 years. Hermione is my daughter-in-law's grandmother and the great grandmother of two of my grandchildren. 

I love the area of Haute Garonne, but I have been frustrated by the lack of records available online, When Ancestry acquired the French genealogy site Geneanet,,I was really hopeful, but I found nothing new.  

What about the new records on FamilySearch? With 9 million new records to help me, I was very hopeful and very busy.

I now have Hermione's ancestry traced back to the early to mid 1700s. It was fun, and I now feel a lot of peace, Don't I wish the records went back further? Of course, But I have done what I can to unite them across the generations. Hopefully this will be of interest to my grandchildren and their cousins on both sides of the Atlantic.