Hello there, everybody, my name is Joana and I'm from Portugal; I originally joined this forum all the way back in 2023 but never got around to actually becoming an active member. After years of occasional lurking, I finally decided to "resurrect" this account. 

I remember first becoming aware of supercentenarians back in 1997 (I was only 6 at the time), when my maternal grandmother showed me a newspaper article about the death of Jeanne Calment. I then had a brief period of interest during the early 2010s, which resurfaced in the 2020s, when, as mentioned above, I became a lurker in this forum and started following news about supercentenarians more closely. Perhaps not coincidentally (the two areas do end up having some overlap), actively starting genealogical research happened around the same time (circa late 2022).

Hoping to find my place as a member of this community, now that I've finally come out of "hiding"!

(By the way, if anyone's wondering, the letters in my username tie back into the genealogical research interest: MMN and MADV are the initials of two of my great-grandparents, the parents of the aforementioned grandmother.)