Family Linkages

I remember looking at my grandfather's photo albums as a child and wondering who all those people in the pictures were.  My paternal grandfather was a meticulous man and it was this trait that preserved all those family pictures in several albums.  Those albums are in my aunt's keeping and I hope my cousin would finally find the time to digitalize them all because they contain precious and priceless memories.  These photographs are proof of our family roots and can greatly help in validating family connections. I have always been interested in history and genealogy and I am trying to complete our own family tree.  I was able to buy the genealogy books of three families in my paternal line but I missed getting that of my paternal great grandmother's father's genealogy book.  I should get one during the next reunion (although I rarely attend those things).  I enjoy reading through the list of names...awed with the fact that once we were all connected by one set of parents.   As I go over the list, I find that people whom I have been friends with for years were actually blood relatives...and that there are people in the list that I would never have imagined to belong in the same clan as I.  If my father's family have all these books, my mother's side is a bit more difficult to reconstruct, although some family members have tried their best to make a family tree during the reunion a few years ago, but then after that not much progress has been made to follow up clues and suggestions.  Until the advent of Facebook, that is.  Facebook has made it possible for me to connect with long lost relatives both on my paternal and maternal sides, and looking at their photos, I see my grandparents, my parents, my uncles...myself.  Hopefully, now that we are connected, we can finally fill in those blanks in our family tree.