Tracing Your Family History: Discover a Perfect Mosaic
By Linda Harrington Dees
Before her 100th birthday in 1998, my Aunt Lettie and I spent an afternoon reminiscing. Aunt Lettie was animated as she talked about her great-grandfather, Hezekiah Harrington. She described his impressive stature and his wife Margaret's ankle-length hair. She got sad when she talked about the childbirth that had taken Margaret's life. She described Hezekiah's diminutive second wife Livinia, and spoke of their 10 children. Aunt Lettie reminisced about untimely deaths, logging accidents, relentless Maine weather and fingers lost to frostbite. She always returned to the fond memories of childhood that included a wealth of humorous stories. As I left, Lettie gave me the family Bible, which held her meticulous notes. Aunt Lettie had opened my heart and stirred my imagination.
Whether you are intrigued by your ancient ancestors or only interested in your recent predecessors, looking back at your family history, or genealogy, can exceed your expectations. I suggest you embark on your journey as if it is a well planned safari. Here are some initial tips for organizing your excursion:
1) Look ahead to what you will need, such as storage for documents and other important pieces of memorabilia.
2) Maintain detailed records by establishing good note-taking, interviewing and organizing skills.
3) Always write down the date, time and place of finding each bit of family treasure – and be as detailed as possible.
4) When you come across a record of a relation or other important person, include that person's full name, relationship to you (if any) and contact information (home address, phone number and e-mail address). Note the type of record (book, magazine, microfilm, website, e-mail), as well as all identifiers (chapter number, page number, individual record number, web or e-mail address).
5) Commit nothing to memory and take everything to heart.
There are wonderful how-to books and genealogy software programs to help you. Some books, such as Genealogy for Dummies, include sample software. The software not only makes your research and record keeping a lot easier, but it makes your results a lot more entertaining because these programs do much more than allow you to merely store, sort and search data. It prints pedigree charts and establishes kinships while also accepting pages and pages of pasted text. This or other genealogy software will print out your vital statistics to read like your life story, and it will display your family photos so that they look like a scrapbook.
Begin at the beginning – this means with you. Sometimes you will be tempted to jump back to some place such as 17th century Salem, just to see if someone in your family was hanged as a witch. Resist temptation since it will lead you on an ancestral tangent and you may end up with misleading records and erroneous kinships. Instead, begin with you and your immediate family and skip no generations. Create file folders by surname to hold your hard-copy documents. When there is an event such as a remarriage, create a duplicate folder to hold any new data. Similar to chapters in a book, these folders will eventually contain different pieces of your family story. For example, my first folder held a story that I wrote when I was in preschool about an afternoon that my dad and I spent looking for a cow with a bell on it. Later I added public records, such as a newspaper clipping that recounted the boating accident that took the lives of my dad's friends and left him clinging to a dory.
Learn how to scribble out a pedigree chart. A working pedigree chart clarifies re-lationships, helps determine where to investigate next and enables you to see when a family line might be out of kilter. Always include your hints and hunches in the margins. This will also help guide your search for personal stories about your family as you head into cyberspace. That is where I discovered my great uncle, James Jewett, a farmer who lived in the 1780s. A lengthy civil complaint filed by his wife of 25 years, Elizabeth, recounted how James had strayed from the marital bed. He had become enamored by a neighbor's teenaged daughter, Alice, “a giantess, standing over 6 feet tall and of immense weight and rotundity.” He had become smitten by her youth, and possibly her planting potential. Alice could single-handedly “plow an entire field in but a forenoon.”
There are several genealogy sites online. For example, the Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) website contains a searchable database. Some of the information on the Internet is free; however, original source documents generally come with a fee. The subscription site Ancestry.com allows you to look at original records. As you proceed with your research, you will find bargains, as well as assistance from amateur genealogists. Check Internet message boards, such as GenForum. Often, amateur genealogists will send you dates and data by email. Many will even package up documents and send them by regular mail.
One of the biggest temptations in doing genealogy is to acquire “instant ancestors” by importing ancestral files called GEDCOMs. The risk here is that you will receive poorly-collected pedigrees or override your existing research. Instead, incorporate these files by importing them to a new file using your genealogy software so that they become excellent source documents. As with any information you retrieve or read anywhere, check that information against original or reliable sources whenever possible.
Consider an adventure in discovering your ancestry. Your own family is one of the many colorful pieces in the perfect mosaic of humanity. Tracing and embracing your ancestors can become a celebration – spirited, if not spiritual. Through provocative artifacts and emotional keepsakes, you will feel their presence in your life as you relive the essence of the history they have left behind. A voyage across generations and great distances, genealogy is a true hobby from the heart.
Linda Dees is a retired defense contractor and technical writer, mother of a boy and girl, wife to a sweetheart, amateur genealogist and aspiring pianist. She won the November 2005 Writer's Digest chronicle contest, and took an honorable mention (out of 19,000 entries) in the 2006 75th Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition.
