My Favorite A-Z Travel Destination — Carson City
How my genealogy hobby led to our world travel
Before we became world travelers I became interested in genealogy and back in the 90s I decided to trace my family roots.
Researching my dad’s family wasn’t too hard. They had been in the San Francisco area for three generations. All I had to do was drive across a bridge to get my information.
But my mom’s family hailed from Virginia City in northern Nevada. I had to drive for a few hours to find her family.
My mom left Virginia City with her parents when she was 15 years old. They headed for San Francisco, following her two older brothers. Her sisters had already left town with their husbands. After a few years she lost touch with the rest of the family she left in Virginia City. I set out to find them and soon found out that Mom’s cousins, uncles, and aunts had all left, too. Most of them moved to Carson City.
It didn’t take long to contact these relatives. And then with the help of a couple of local cousins I organized a family reunion in Carson City. 75 people showed up for our reunion dinner!
About 45 of those 75 earlier in the day visited the Fourth Ward School in Virginia City which is now a museum. My mom attended the Fourth Ward School and so did her siblings and her cousins and her nephews and her nieces. Most of them attended Virginia City High School, too, and we recognized many familiar names while perusing the many pictures of students on the walls.
In the first few years of my retirement, I drove to the county courthouse in Virginia City and to the state archives in Carson City to find family records. I even drove to the University of Nevada campus in Reno to read old copies of Mark Twain’s newspaper, The Territorial Enterprise.
It took a while but I finally gathered all the information I could. The next step was to go back to where my people came from. Well, all of my mom’s family and half of my dad’s came from Ireland. So we started planning for a five-week trip to see if we could find the birthplaces of my six Irish great-grandparents.
Thanks to genealogy, we were on our way to becoming world travelers!
We found a few of those birthplaces during that 2002 trip. And also met a few cousins, including Henry Muckle who has become a close friend.
In 2006 we went back to Carson City for our second family reunion, ten years after our first. This time we brought three honored guests with us — Cousin Henry, his son Paul, and his then-fiancee (now wife) Geraldine — who were visiting us that year.
In 2002 our first grandkid was born and in 2010 we started taking him with us on short trips around the western US.
In 2010 we decided to drive to Carson City to visit some of our Muckle relatives. One of them is our grandson’s twin cousin. They were born on the same day in November 2002. We thought it was time for them to meet each other and we had a nice lunch with cousin Doris, her two daughters and their kids.
After lunch, Doris gave us the grand tour of Carson City, which included the Governor’s Mansion (see top photo), and Harry was quite impressed.
We also went on a few tours of our own, including the state museum which is housed in the old mint building. The basement of this building has been remodeled to resemble one of the old silver mines that made Nevada famous. Harry thought that was cool. He also enjoyed an exhibit that featured an old bright red car.
Later that year we traveled with Harry to Texas to visit some of my wife’s relatives. And the following year the three of us flew to Colorado to attend a family wedding.
Our last trip with just Harry was in 2012 when we traveled to Lompoc in central California to visit two of the famous California Missions that were founded by Spaniards in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
We discovered that we really liked traveling with our grandson who at an early age expressed great interest in cars and maps and freeways and airports and flying to exotic places. We introduced Harry and his parents and sister to Guam a few years ago. And a few years later we visited Guam again, this time with our younger daughter and her family.
Then in 2019 all ten of us flew to Ireland. It was our best vacation ever!
We have taken many trips across oceans during the last twenty years. I wonder if any of them would have happened if I hadn’t gotten interested in genealogy all those years ago and traveled to Carson City to find my mom’s family.
OK, I better get going on my D story. Sam Millichap, Adrienne Beaumont, Michael Rhodes, and Anne Bonfert are way ahead of me. At this rate, I will still be on my alphabet stories a year from now!
