Tribute to David H. Trout

David H. Trout is a major reason that I am a family historian.

In 2007, I went with several older family members, including my grandpa and some of his siblings to a small cemetery—the kind so tiny, I had to search by scrolling around in the general area on Google Maps, because it's not even listed. My grandpa and his siblings had had the goal of giving their grandfather, David H. Trout, a proper headstone, since all he had was a little plaque. They had all pooled resources and had one made and so, on a characteristically hot Texas September afternoon, we made a mini-family reunion out of the occasion and drove out to install it. I was ambivalent about the experience at first, but when we got to the cemetery, I found myself fascinated. I walked around with my mother and a great-aunt as they knelt and dusted the reddish dirt off of headstones of family members I'd never heard of—including my long-dead great-great-grandfather.

Upon returning home, I pulled out an old folder in a closet that included pages of hand-drawn pedigree charts created and distributed by someone in my family decades ago. I played around online until I found family history software to download and that day began figuring out how to do research with the information I had. It was very basic and now that I'm close to having a bachelor's in the field I realize how little I knew. But the enthusiasm was there and has never gone away, and that's what is most important.