*Tin Anniversary*

I am having an anniversary of sorts. It's been ten years now since I started working on genealogy "seriously," and nearly that long since I decided to try blogging. From its start, this blog was meant to report Forward Progress on MY Gillespies, which is to say, progress that relates solely to those descendants of John Gillespie and Jane Woods of County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Period. There are innumerable other Gillespies in the world, but it has not been my purpose to research them nor to report on them here even if I were privately interested. It has been a selfishly narrow decision to make, and one that I think our previous family historian, Aunt Edith, also had to make. We have only so much time given to us, and so how shall we spend it? Doing what we think matters most in the long run.

Now, ten years later, I feel this policy of My-Gillespies-Only needs some amending. The simple truth is that we don't know what we don't know, and to overcome that, it seems to me, I have to be willing to open more doors to see what's on the other side. By widening the net, purposefully, I increase the chances of furthering what matters most. And what is that? In my lifetime, I would like to find the Gillespie connection back to Scotland. I know it's there, we all do. But I want to book my flight to Glasgow knowing the names of the ancestors who started this story. I have hope. I think there's still time.

With that said, I made a more conscious choice last fall to start wandering off the beaten path of my Gillespie research. Following small DNA matches that appear to connect me and others of my known relations back to New York, I've started to more fully engage in understanding exactly who were the Gillespie family groups of early Ulster/ Orange/ Dutchess counties. My only goal has become this: to learn more even if the work never ties back to MY Gillespies directly. By finding a balance between keeping my questions mentally focused and my research disciplined, and allowing room for curiosity, instinct, and even accidental insights, I believe it's still possible to discover more and move our collective understanding forward.

From here on, the posts you read on this blog may not apply directly to MY Gillespies. In the title of each forthcoming blog post, I will somewhere embed an asterisk (*) if the information being posted is something only a direct cousin to My Gillespies would want to read. Otherwise, expect my posts to cover my thoughts on various research discoveries as they pertain to the surname Gillespie, even if the discoveries, for now, seem irrelevant to my immediate family. As with the world in general, it becomes increasingly more obvious to me that we are all connected somehow. By shining a curious and insistent light on other early Gillespie families, we might yet find our way back to Glasgow.