I have been doing genealogy for about 45 years now. My grandfather got me interested in it as a teenager, back when we used to go clean the gravesites of his parents, grandparents, and other relatives in two old church cemeteries where we had large family plots. I loved the names of the churches — Big Sandy and Little Sandy. He would mow the grass around the family plots while I picked up sticks, pine cones, and anything that didn't belong. Then, as we hand-trimmed the grass around each stone and gently swept them off with small brushes so we wouldn't damage them, he would tell me stories about each person. I loved hearing what he remembered about them and who was related to whom. 

He also took me around every summer to visit with all of his brothers, cousins, and anyone still living, and he helped me catalog all the people in our family as I wrote it all down in a notebook. I drew elaborate charts and family trees by hand because there was no software back then, and certainly no internet! 

Fast forward 45 years later, and at the last family gathering, I passed my phone around the room and let everybody's kids and grandkids record their own information to bring everything up to date! Much easier than the letter writing I did all those years, and definitely less dramatic than unrolling five feet of butcher paper with my tree drawn out in tiny handwriting, running all the way back to the 1400s! Everyone loved when I would roll out the family tree, but my funniest memory was when my brother discovered we had an ancestor named Hugh, which he read as Ugg, and said, "Oh wow! You traced us all the way back to cavemen!"