Ancestry Magazine

Who can possibly explain the feelings we get when we go back to the places where our ancestors lived and died? Whether your people made their home on a lonely prairie, a quiet farm, a remote mining camp, a sleepy town, or a bustling city, there’s something there that’s calling us back. For some reason, we have a yearning to walk where they walked and to soak up the atmosphere of the places they called home. Maybe we derive some strength from knowing that they survived the good times and the bad times there. Maybe it’s that feeling of continuity we need so much. Maybe it’s simply our never-ending search to find some physical sign of their existence. Or, maybe our pilgrimage is an attempt to honor them and say, “I appreciate what you have done for me.” Maybe it is a chance to say thank you for making the choices and sacrifices that gave us the life we have today.

With the help of a local history, I can better imagine the surroundings of the ancestor who had a small milk farm in Brooklyn in the 1830s. I can follow the renter&# 146;s path of the twice-widowed ancestor who, listed as a dressmaker in Brooklyn directories in the 1850s and 60s, used her skills to provide for her four little children. With contemporary newspaper accounts, I can envision the unlit streets patrolled by my policeman ancestor from the 1860s to 1892, when he became precinct captain.

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to take a sentimental journey back to Brooklyn, where at least six generations of my family lived and died. Looking at the metropolis now, it’s impossible to picture the quaint, sparsely populated community that it was when my first ancestor settled there. The clippity-clop sounds of horse-drawn carriages have given way to the harsh twenty-first-century sounds of traffic, sirens, and subways.

As I walked through the neighborhoods where they lived, I searched for something–anything–that would have been familiar to them. Most of the landscape they knew has long since changed. A few structures survive to tell the tale. In some places, the only things left from their days are the blue sky overhead, the damp air, and the smell of the ocean breeze. But even in those remainders, their spirits seem to linger.

Something I just had to do was to walk the Brooklyn Bridge. The now-famous structure meant so much to my grandfather that he wrote in his single-page autobiography: “I crossed it May 20/83–a few days before it opened to the public.” He lived within a block of the bridge and no doubt kept a daily vigil from the time the first caissons went in for the foundations, to the official ceremonies on opening day, 24 May 1883.

Of equal significance were my visits to the church in which two of my ancestors were married on 11 April 1865 (the same week Lincoln was assassinated); in which my grandfather buried his only son who died as a result of being gassed in World War I; and in which my parents were married less than a month after the stock market crashed in 1929.

As I passed the modest but neat redbrick house where my parents struggled to raise a family of six, I wondered, but couldn’t remember, what life was like there. My father became terminally ill in that house when I was a baby so I never knew him, but I wonder if he would be pleased to know that I have tried to find all the places he lived when he was growing up. I also walked the grounds of Fordham University where he studied for four years. I studied the campus, trying to figure out which buildings would have been standing when he was there. Then I found and photographed the building where he practiced law so long ago.

The paths they walked and the places our ancestors lived are steeped in history. We don’t have to be expert detectives to capture the sense of what it was like to live in their times. Traveling to the places where they lived can help us understand our people like nothing else can. But if we don’t have the time or money to travel, a virtual family history odyssey made with a history book, old photographs, old newspapers, or the Internet can be immensely enriching. The nostalgic warmth that comes from rediscovering places that were meaningful to our family is priceless. In this issue of Ancestry we hope to help you find ways that will transport you back to the times and places your ancestors called home.