I have been working on a genealogy of the descendants of my ancestors since I was about 14 years old, and on the descendants of the ancestors of my late wife since we married in 1983. My families represent the early 20th century immigrant experience: Czechs and Slovaks who emigrated to the Buckeye Road area of Cleveland, Ohio, in the years before World War I (1890-1912). My wife's families came from England, Scotland and Wales, some as far back as 1635, some as recently as 1885, and settled primarily in Massachusetts and New Jersey. She was related to five U.S. Presidents and to Princess Diana; I am related to peasants and gypsies.

While I have been doing genealogy for quite a while, and while I had used Find A Grave as a source of information for a number of years, I only started contributing information and photos and creating memorials a few years ago. I am just as happy to contribute information and photos to memorials created or maintained by others as I am to create them myself. While I primarily work on the families indicated above, I have also done work on some of the families of people who have married into those families, just because it's fun.

I have three wonderful children who, naturally, are the ultimate convergence of these families, but make no mistake, I am not doing this for them. If they or their descendants find it interesting or useful at some point, that would be great, but I do it just because I enjoy it. To me, it is much more fun and interesting to do genealogy than it is to have one. Doing genealogy is like doing a jigsaw puzzle with hundreds of thousands of pieces, no edge pieces, no picture on a box to show you what it is supposed to look like, you have to go on a scavenger hunt to find each piece, and sometimes you have to solve logic puzzles to figure out whether it really is a piece of the same puzzle, and if so, how it fits in. Most of my friends and relatives think that I am more than somewhat strange for preferring to explore a cemetery rather than to play golf or to watch sports on TV, but that's OK, it takes all kinds. And I know where they are buried.