Greetings and Salutations

I'm just going to be honest here, I'm not a genealogist.  I'm not even a family historian.  I just wanted to get answers about the grandfather I never knew.  Well one of them anyway.  Yet as I began the journey and shared my musings with my dad, it became our journey.  Then as I shared my Quest with my mother,  she told me things about her family that I had always known but never realized -- I should explain by saying that my mom is full blooded Mexican, my Grandfather on her side was Italian.  It was only a few years before he died that I realized he was my mom's step-dad.  When he died I learned that there was a big gap in my knowledge of his life.  I knew he received a purple heart in WW2 but I always thought he marched through Europe with Patton.  I found out in his records that he served in the Pacific.  That's when the bug really manifested inside me, no it took control of me.  I have studied and restarted my research three times as I learned more about this new field of science I was delving into, as I read more about beginning genealogy, the how to's, the where to's, and the what not to do's.

I finally realized that this was going to be bigger than just getting some answers, I wanted to do this right, I looked into some genealogy software to help me organize, I settled on Family Tree Maker 2012, I'm still looking at Legacy and Roots, but FTM just feels more user friendly.  So I will from time to time come back and list my journey ( all the resources say to keep a journal or your research so you have a record of how you went from a to b on one branch) so that's essentially what I'm doing here.... If you have any tips or suggestions for me feel free to comment.  I will from time to time request ideas and thoughts from the community at large from time to time but I just wanted to introduce myself for now. So see ya later.  By the way I welcome comments so feel free to let me know you stopped by, what you want me to address or just say you hate me.