User talk:Marine 69-71/Why do I write in Wikipedia

I congratulate you for your great efforts in telling the world "the real" story about Puerto Ricans and our contributions to the world in general, and to the United States in particular. Felicidades. User:Gutierfa

Why we write

Hi, Tony - thanks for the Christmas and New Year's greeting, and the same to you. I was moved reading your page on why you write in Wikipedia, and see some elements we share. I started working on family history 15 years ago, wanting to know more about ours; all we knew was that we were mostly of English descent and "old Americans," which seemed boring while growing up in metropolitan NY, where most of my friends were 2nd and 3rd generation children of immigrants. Well, of course we all have "old" families in one way or another. A year later, my older sister was diagnosed with cancer and two years later died. During this period, I kept working on my project, sharing stories with her, her family and my other sister and her family - it gave me a sense of a deeper and wider family than we had known personally, and the complexity of the American experience. Discovered we had German, Scots-Irish, French Huguenot and an Italian ancestor in addition to English! And at least one Mohawk cousin, descended from two English-American boys taken captive in 1707 and adopted into a village near Montreal. Now I also have what I call my "online cousins", descendants of 19th-century connections, and they've shared findings.

So, the work drew me into history again, following curiosity about the larger American migrations, and into many different areas. A nephew suggested I might like Wikipedia - and there I found a place to use the new learning (which has also meant a lot of reading of academic histories)- especially social histories of minorities who had been overlooked for so long. Have worked on many articles about people from the 19th century, as well as larger social movements across a wide cross-section of US history. All along the pull was that Wikipedia has an audience, and my work could help expand knowledge. So keep writing; we're helping build knowledge all the time of the human experience.Parkwells (talk) 18:21, 25 December 2012 (UTC)