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Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. By this time next week I expect I will be overstuffed on turkey, overloaded on football and overjoyed at spending a long weekend with my extended family.  I will also have spent the entire month posting (almost) daily status updates on my personal Facebook profile about the things I am grateful for.  I hope to be overwhelmed with gratitude.

At the beginning of November, in preparation for a month of gratitude, I spent some quiet time really thinking about the things in my life for which I am deeply thankful.  You made the list!  Yes, you.  As did my ancestors, some of my other relatives, different technologies, and family – old and new, in all shapes and sizes, warts and all.

Today I offer a part of that list to you. In return, I’d love to hear what you are thankful for this Thanksgiving week.

• I am thankful for the wonderfully generous genealogy community, online and offline.
• I am thankful for the 30,365 databases on Ancestry.com that allow me to research large parts of my family tree from the comfort of my own home at any hour of the day or night. Wait…30,366 databases…30,367…I can’t keep up.  And, that makes me VERY thankful.
• I am thankful for new genealogists who aren’t afraid to ask questions and I am thankful for seasoned genealogists who generously share their experience.
• I am thankful for distant cousins who post their family trees online, with attached records and sources.
• I am thankful for the 90,000 Ancestry World Archives Project contributors who have indexed over 100 million records, including over 700,000 records pertaining to the Holocaust and victims of Nazi persecution.
• I am thankful to my mom and dad and my Uncle Karl who nurtured my interest in family history from a very young age.
• I’m thankful that I can send a quick email or write a post on a message board and get, virtually, instantaneous responses to my genealogy queries instead of having to wait by the mailbox for weeks on end.
• I am thankful for my parents and their parents and their parents and…you get the idea. The more I learn about my ancestry, the more grateful I am for the lives they lived and the choices they made that brought me to be who I am and where I am today!

Happy Thanksgiving to each of you!  What are you thankful for?

Until next time – Have fun climbing your family tree…