Tagging Along

I've been tagged! Friend and fellow genealogist Megan Smolenyak has passed on the baton in a game of tag going around the genealogical blogging world. The hard part is that I have to come up with five interesting things to share about myself that most folks probably don't know (and you may wish you didn't!). Hmmm...

1. I met my wonderful husband at a funeral, he proposed underwater and we were married on the top of a mountain with the most amazing view.
2. My maternal grandfather, a big part of my passion for genealogy, died of pancreatic cancer the day I turned six months old. When my mother asked him what he wanted his grandchildren to call him, knowing that he was dying he said "they won't ever call me anything." The name Granddaddy Owens, as he came to be called by all of us, was immortalized in print in the dedication of my recent book, and my mother said that he would have been so proud. I was the only grandchild he ever got to meet, so I count myself blessed.
3. My favorite job, outside of genealogy of course, was helping to design and build robots at the Field Robotics Center of Carnegie Mellon University back when I was an undergraduate. What a blast that was!
4. I'm a pretty good flute player and at one point considered persuing it as a career, studying with Bernard Goldberg, then principal flutist of the Pittsburgh Symphony, while I was an undergrad at CMU. That is, until I was introduced to those interesting robots that I mentioned above and changed my major after my sophomore year! So how exactly did I then go from robots to genealogy? That's a story for another day...
5. I'm drawn to cemeteries whereever I go...but that is probably something you would expect from me as a genealogist. So what else is there to say. I have three wonderful children, ages 4-13, but many of you probably know that too. My American family roots are primarily in eastern South and North Carolina, with a smattering of Pennsylvania. From there my family tree stretches back to France, England, Wales, Germany and Poland. I'm a voracious reader, love to cross stitch and garden (though I never seem to have the time anymore), and (shhh! don't tell anyone) I used to misspell the word genealogy!

So, as you can see, I am human. I'm a very busy Mom, a disorganized but passionate genealogist, and basically just a regular person like every one of you :)

Now the challenge is to come up with five other bloggers to tag - a hard act to follow since so many excellent genealogy bloggers have already participated! To broaden the waters, so to speak, I thought I'd cast my tags out to Hugh Watkins' Genealoge, Michael John Neill's Rootdig.com, Denise at Family Matters: Tech Support for the Family Historian, Lorelle VanFossen of Camera on the Road, and Joe Edmon at Genealogy Blog (since Leland's already been tagged, I expect a post from each of you!).