The Story of Me, Pt 1: Ancient History

A while after eating dinner tonight my mom called me.  This call surprises me because she is out of town visiting with friends and she usually doesn't call me when she is out unless there is some piece of gossip she just can't wait to share.  She already did this two days ago so I am a bit confused.  I picked up the phone and answered and she goes through her list of typical questions: how are you? How is the boy? etc.

She then asks me if I know when and where her father was born.  I raise my eyebrows in surprise as I reach for her file folder.

A while ago, probably well over a year ago, I started looking into my family's past.  It started by me wanting to make an accurate family tree for our son.  He has several heritages so I had a lot of digging to do.  But while doing so I found a long and rich history with my mother's paternal family.  I was able to trace them all the way back to the 1600s.  In land that would become part of the USA.

As it turns out, once upon a time there was a little town called San Marcial in Socorro County, New Mexico.  It was a little town that got wiped out by the Rio Grande twice! My family comes from there and was able to trace them way back in New Mexico.  I found a newspaper announcement of my great grandparents' marriage.  I found a copy of their marriage certificate.  Census records show many children that did not quite make it to adulthood and I often wonder about their deaths.  What I has puzzled me the most is why did my great grandparents leave New Mexico?  They had lived there for well over a century when they packed up their kids and headed to the west coast.  Unfortunately, I have no one to ask.  A mystery I will likely never solve.

My mother will be taking a road trip to New Mexico next month with a friend and she hopes to dig up some more information on her family.  Hopefully she will share it with me and I can add it to her file folder.  I do enjoy the genealogy searching but I get frustrated with dead ends and give up for months at a time.  It's one of my flaws: I give up quickly.