🌊Lakeside Stories

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The Origins of My Family History Journey

Preserving voices from the past, one story at a time.

1950s Poplar Beach, Cayuga Lake

My Father

My father, a native of Springfield, Ohio, often told me about his family vacations on Indian Lake. As a boy, he was captivated by the long evenings when his parents and grandparents sat together, trading stories of “the old folks.”

“They would talk for hours,” he remembered, “and all those names and stories—I wish I had asked more questions. I wish I had written it down.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, he began visiting courthouses and compiling genealogy notes. Eventually, he passed a thick binder of dot-matrix printouts to me, sparking my own curiosity about what 21st-century resources might uncover. That was the moment my obsession with “dead relatives” truly began.


1950s Cabin on Indian Lake


My Mother & Grandmother

On my mother’s side, genealogy runs even deeper. She and my father carried on the work of my grandmother, who had carried on her father’s work, who had carried on his mother’s—and so the chain stretched back through the generations.

I spent summers at my grandmother’s house on the west shore of Cayuga Lake in Upstate New York, where I pored over her archive of journals, letters, photos, and documents. More than anything, though, I loved her stories.

And yet, as so many family historians will understand, I now regret not writing more of those stories down and not asking more questions while I had the chance.
1940s Sunday afternoon on Poplar Beach

And Me

This blog is my attempt to do what my father wished he had done, and what my grandmother inspired me to continue: to write the stories down.

Here, I’ll share both the old stories and my new discoveries, as I sift through the papers, photos, and records left in my care. Stories Remembered is where memory meets history—one ancestor, one letter, one photograph at a time.


1990s Poplar Beach, Cayuga Lake


Do you have family stories you wish you’d written down? I’d love to hear how you’ve started preserving them.


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