Like many American families, especially the ones who “went West” to settle wild and woolly frontiers, if you give the family tree a hard shake it’s likely a few scoundrels will fall out.My own tree had several, but the one who most intrigued me as a child was The Outlaw. That was all that the old folks ever called him.
So you think you know something about the census? Genealogists love the U.S. federal census. There is a unique thrill to finding these snapshots of our families, spaced ten years apart. If that was all it was, it would be wonderful, but just like they say on TV—wait, there’s more.
For so many people, the excitement and passion surrounding family history is the quest of discovering who their ancestors really were. What did my great-great-grandfather think of farming?
There’s never enough time to check all of the sources that might contribute to o ur family history, so the only solution is to check them out in some sort of logical order that uses our time most effectively.
“In all of us there is a hunger marrow deep to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainment in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.”
– Alex Haley
Whenever we travel the country, people question us about our hobby.
Human beings look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then we are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well, and when they were part of his grandparents.
Ask two people to tell you about the same event or the same person and you’ll get two different stories. The facts may remain the same—Grandpa was six-foot two-inches and born during a snowstorm—but the perspective will be unique to the storyteller.As the family historian, you probably want to remember each of these individual nuances. And you can, via an oral history.
Why Oral History?
Sifting through family photo albums, Crystal Woodland stumbled upon her grandmother’s “patchwork”—a book her grandmother created twenty years earlier from family photos, stories, and leftover fabric scraps.
Success, fortune, or simply a better life—they’re all part of the game when you’re chasing the American Dream.Likewise, they were the goals for a large number of our ancestors, including the ones who immigrated to America in search of a life different from the lives they left behind. And for some of these ancestors, that new life included starting a family business.
It’s frustrating when it happens—hitting a blip in our family history. When something, someone, somewhere just stops. Disappears. Almost like they never existed at all.We get over it, tracing another family line, digging a little deeper for alternative sources of information. But when you’re searching for African American ancestors, those little blips aren’t always so maneuverable.