Hello world!

Bienvenue!

Joining the rest of the world with a WordPress blog. No doubt this’ll get used as much as any of the others I’ve tried to set up in the past …

Anyway. The point …. what is the point of this blog? Well I would like it to be two-fold really. Firstly it’ll act as a sort of outlet for my mind’s general waverings. Some good, some not so good. Some happy, some not so happy. Secondly, it’ll be a record of not only my writings (although they themselves will be posted at my deviantART account: http://ashkej.deviantart.com) but also of my family history explorations.

Both of those last two almost deserve blogs of their own … but a short describe here will do.

Writing

I’ve been having a love affair with writing and language for as long as I can remember. Books played an enormous role in my childhood – and they still do today. Rare is the time where I don’t have a book on the go, and there are always too many books that I want to read. Because of that encouragement from my parents to read, and educate myself through the process, I started to craft my own worlds. Some of them are the same as this one. Some of them aren’t. Whilst not a Fantasy-junkie (no D&D, no WoW) I do like working in worlds where I set the operating parameters (within reason ….).

Genealogy

I’ve been ‘doing’ family tree research for …. over 10 years now. Scary thought. It all started, I suppose, because of family stories. Or the lack of them. Both my parents were products of wartime relationships – my mother’s parents were married, but later divorced; my father’s parents …. well, it was less official. On the one hand I had tales of Native Americans, and on the other …. virtually nothing. That sucked me in. However, it was the English sides of both my parents that I investigated first (hey, it was much easier). Strangely, my father’s side was easier to track (all thanks to a letter with a return address and a friendly email contact at a library in Michigan) and we are in contact. My mother’s side …. well, with a surname like Adams it’s a bit more tricky. Add in the fact that her grandfather was adopted as an orphan so doesn’t appear anywhere with his natural parents (or his adopted ones for that matter …..) and it makes it much harder. Not impossible, and I’ll track them somehow, but tricky. But I am in contact with cousins of varying degrees of my mother.

So there you have it. Me in a nutshell. This blog in a nutshell.

I hope it lives up to my expectations!