It wasn't what I set out to do, and it definitely wasn't what I expected to do. But genealogical breakthroughs rarely are either, it seems.

My mother and I have now collected more than 9,000 relatives in our genealogy. Needless to say, you literally need a computer to keep track of all of that. There are three families I feel the greatest affinity for. Two of them are Scottish, and Highlander families at that.

Mom made one of those rare but very valuable genealogical finds recently: A cache of information about a family line that's more complete than what we had. It seems like the longer you do this, the less often it happens, but the more you appreciate it.

It got me thinking about why these kinds of finds are exciting. Indeed, to a non-genealogist, it probably seems weird.

Yes, George W. Bush and John Kerry are cousins. Ninth cousins twice removed, but still cousins.

I went to a family reunion this past weekend. You typically need rosters at my family's family reunions, because my grandmother had 13 brothers and sisters. I don't know why, but before I got into genealogy, I just couldn't keep everyone straight.

Now that I know how people are connected to one another, it's somehow easier to keep it straight.

At the end of the day, my aunt drove me out to the house where my grandmother grew up.

I found some useful links today. It's from a genealogy blog that copied verbatim one of my entries from a few months ago (but with attribution, at least), so turnabout is fair play.

For links to online passenger lists, see this entry in the Genealogy Blog. Looking through it, I see names of ships I know I've seen before but I can't remember when.

I have posted my genealogy, including Charlemagne, online.

As for why a Scot is making a big deal about Charlemagne's birthday, well, I'm descended from him. But I guess I could have said I did this to celebrate Walter Percy Chrysler's birthday. Or William Austin, but you probably haven't heard of him.

For some reason, both of my grandmothers' genealogies have always been somewhat of a dead end. It took me about 30 seconds to trace my grandfathers back into the 1600s, but I could only go back a couple of generations on my grandmothers.

One more tip for those of you looking to get started in genealogy: Don't forget the library. You know, that place with tons of books in it that you don't want to set foot in since you discovered the Internet. The Internet's less reliable and the information on it definitely leans towards some subjects more than others, but Google's always open and it's faster to turn on the computer than it is to hop in the car and drive.

I'll admit it. I'm not ashamed of it. I'm a johnny-come-lately to the genealogy game. My computer can tell you how I'm related to more than 1,200 different people. And I just started last week.

This past summer, someone told me he'd traced his genealogy back to William the Conqueror. I acted impressed, but I didn't believe him. I dismissed it as wishful thinking.