Editor’s Note
I’d like to think that if I had been born a family historian, I would have been smart enough to ask some basic questions of my older relatives before it was too late. But my fascination with family history didn’t start until my four daughters went to school and I finally found time to fill in their baby books—the kind with a four-generation family tree. By then, asking questions of my older relatives was no longer an option.It would have been nice if I had known the names of my four grandparents, but I only had the names of my parents, their birth and death dates, and the same information for one grandfather. My other grandparents had died young, and my siblings and I knew nothing about them.While I was immediately intrigued by the prospect of who my grandparents were and where they were from, I had no idea of how to find answers. So when I read a newspaper article about a beginning genealogy class being sponsored by the local genealogical society, I jumped at the chance to register.
The class opened my eyes to the vast number of resources available. It also taught me the importance of beginning at home and talking to my relatives.
At the time, my nearest relatives were eight hundred miles away, so my research began with letter writing. My first barrage of questions went to every possible family member I could locate. Back then, the post office went to great lengths to forward letters, so a letter I sent to a cousin with a very outdated address eventually managed to reach him. Had it not been for that good fortune, the search for my father’s family would have come to an abrupt end.
That cousin, who responded to me with a beautiful letter that I cherish to this day, passed my letter to his mother and his sister. The information they provided about my father’s side of the family gave me an exciting starting point. Responses from churches, cemeteries, and county clerks gave me even more to build on.
The census, however, was a bigger challenge. The library with census records was more than an hour away and kept limited hours. Censuses weren’t indexed yet, so on my first trip, I spent four hours going name-by-name through the microfilm for 1850 Brooklyn—the third largest city in the United States in its day. Just before closing time, I stumbled across one of my ancestors. I made quick handwritten notes since copiers weren’t available in those days.
I found that, for a small fee, my local librarian could rent census microfilms. I bought a cheap microfilm reader and took my rented films home for a week at a time. I was in my glory, but my other responsibilities were slipping.
With so much film to cover in such a short time, I came up with a sure solution—I had my daughters read the microfilm for me. For each family name a daughter found, she earned a quarter. I think they call it bribery today, but it worked like a charm. Not only did my daughters find family names, they all became interested in family history in the process.
It’s amazing to think that wh at once took us weeks to find on microfilm can now be found in minutes. And it’s not just census records that make it possible for us to break through decades-old brick walls from our living rooms—there are immigration records, obituaries, newspaper clippings, vital records, and a host of other documents being added to the Internet every single day.
But no matter how different our searches seem today, finding family still gives each of us something dependable to hold on to. And in a world where changes often come too fast, that’s a good enough reason for people like me—not a born family historian—to go to such lengths to preserve our past.
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