I have always been eclectic in what I want to learn about, but nearly every aspect of my learning has to do with history, a love I received at an early age from my father, who seemed to have been given his love of history by his father.... so it's a genetic Wood thing. My dad has a love for war history, and so from a young age I was immersed in it, watching historical dramas and documentaries on television and reading books he had brought home. From a young age, I thought everyone loved history and thought it odd when I got to school and found out that not everyone shared my love.
I love to read and have always been a bookworm. My family jokes that I devour books, particularly books and writings of a historical nature, both fiction and non-fiction. I own a vast collection of history books, mostly American history, and will use them in my research whenever possible.I do write some articles of a historical nature for my hub on HubPages, which you can check out through my link list on the main page.
For me, collecting the odd bits of historical trivia has always been sort of an amusement. It is those little blurbs written in history books that caught my fancy, such as a signer of the Declaration of Independence was a Button Gwinett, and that Queen Elizabeth the First had grooves in the floor leading to her bed in her main bedchamber (Thanks for that tidbit, Mr. Madrid!). That sort of stuff is fascinating.
It is because of this love of history that I got into genealogy. Now it is my genealogy interests that fuel my love of history, because I come across incidents in my family research that I need to then research from a historical standpoint. Examples of this are the history of Alsace, which is where my mother's grandfather hailed from, hangings in Allegheny County in the latter part of the 19th century, since one of my ancestors was a maker of hangmen's ropes, and the incidents that killed some of my family members, such as the Hatfield (Pennsylvania) train wreck in September 1900 and the explosion of the U.S. S. Cassin in the Philadelphia Naval Yard.
