It's genealogy season. One of about three that rotate throughout my year, brought on by innocent questions or comments by relatives and friends, the premiere of a new season of a genealogy show or (most excitingly of all) the release of a new online records database. This most recent obsessive research fest is courtesy a new season AND a new record database, making the genealogy fever particularly rabid.

Let's get a few things out in the open, shall we? Yes, there are television shows (plural!) based solely on researching a person's family history. (Hide your yawn. It makes family historians panic and rush to prove why we're so enthralled, why you should be too. Did I mention the celebrities and traveling and....wait, come back!) And yes, a new digital records (birth, marriage, death, military, etc.) database is a big deal. The interweb doesn't bring quite everything to your fingertips - yet. Digitizing historic records is an ongoing (usually volunteer-based) process, at best. You say your great-great grandmother is from a town where the courthouse burned down three times in her life? Welcome to the dreaded brick wall. No leads, no records. (Local courthouses are where you're most likely to find birth/marriage/death records for ancestors. And yes, I have come across a county courthouse that burned down three times during the time my husband's elusive ancestor lived in that area. Rotten luck or an ancestor with a penchant for arson, who can say?)

While my interest in genealogy never wanes, I admit the height of the fever only lasts a few weeks at most. I exhaust all new resources, or more likely, real life and other activities demand my attention. I mentally make a note of any new places I need to include on future vacations genealogy trips. I've explored a lost hundred fifty year old church cemetery hidden in a stand of trees in a defunct golf course. I've raced to visit several other cemeteries ahead of a blizzard on our way home from a cross-country trip. I've spent countless hours at a microfilm reader deciphering old German newspapers in the town my parents grew up. But that's another story.

As for this genealogy season, I'm hoping to break down a few stubborn brick walls on one branch of my husband's family tree. I expect the new records to be best suited for what I'm missing there. In the span of a few hours, I've already found out details about two women who have eluded me. It's very exciting. It's also a little silly. Neither of them are actual blood relations, but not knowing about their backgrounds is vaguely... itchy.