One problem with genealogy is most don’t get started until they are older and consequently opportunity is lost. I am now the patriarch in my family line at age 66. I no longer have anyone in the family to ask. I was a bit fortunate in that I got the bug in meeting a great uncle for the first and only time filling me with family history that ultimately I proved wrong. But I got started early and preserved some family records, letters, deeds, lists, tax records, other papers, etc. that I got from my grandfather at an early age. Trivial stuff we all throw away. They were a jumbled mess in a desk drawer and probably would have disappeared had he not given them to me. It was also information impossible to dig out of courthouse records that dated back to the 1820s. Then when my grandfather died at age 93 in 1983 I met all kinds of great aunts at the funeral from my maternal grandmother’s side of the family who were contemporaries of my grandfather. My grandmother died two months before I was born! I listened to them reminisce about her side of the family I knew nothing about. Those few clues opened a treasure trove of information. Still, a lot of information was lost and that branch has few genealogical seekers to compare notes with and I keep looping back to only the information I discovered and dug out. I contacted over the years many other family genealogists that have long passed on along with their records.

Moral of the story is don’t wait.