It’s a Sir Walter Scott kind of day for The Legal Genealogist:

BREATHES there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
  ‘This is my own, my native land!’
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d
  From wandering on a foreign strand?

It’s been a long nearly-two-weeks-on-the-road road trip.

From the Genealogical Research Institute of Virginia 10 days ago, with a side trip to the Library of Virginia for research, to the North Carolina Genealogical Society this past weekend, with a side trip to the North Carolina State Archives for research, to the Mount Vernon Genealogical Society yesterday, with side trips to Mount Vernon itself and to NARA College Park for research…

Today I turn my footsteps home.

It has been a wonderful road trip. I’m so very grateful to all three of these organizations for including me in their programs. Getting a chance to visit with old friends and meet new ones and to talk to people whose passion for genealogy is as great as my own is just terrific.

But today I turn my footsteps home.

I got to spend time with family on this trip: my mother’s youngest sister, some of my cousins. I even got to meet a cousin on this trip: Jim Poole of South Carolina is a cousin in my Pettypool line and we had a chance to sit and talk and get to know each other after the NCGS annual meeting.

But today I turn my footsteps home.

I picked up some neat details, even some on my own family, in my research on this trip. Some record types I hadn’t had a chance to use before. And a Virginia deed dovetailing with a North Carolina deed partitioning land of an ancestor after his death that adds confirmation to the identity of one daughter from whom I descend.

But today I turn my footsteps home.

Catch you later.

After five or six hours on the road… and an hour of two of cuddling with a pair of cats.