Most of us started our research from home and family sources. First we questioned older living family members, and then we quickly went on to whatever documents the family had saved.
Maria, a favorite hospice patient of mine, died recently at age ninety-six. I would visit her weekly in the brown-shingled home she shared with her son and daughter.
From her bed in what was once the dining room, Maria could look past a table filled with plants and childhood pictures of her four sons and three daughters to her backyard.
Using what we already know about a person, it is possible to reconstruct portions of an individual’s life from the facts published in an obituary. Obituaries can provide a wealth of important information and research clues and include valuable pointers that can send our research in new directions. They’re easy to use and they’re easy to access. But they may not remain so useful forever.
Welcome to Found, a new feature of Ancestry Magazine in which I take up the hunt to track down the rightful owners of items submitted by you, the readers. You tell me what you have, I go into detective mode to find the home of the first owner or family, and you get to return it. Everyone else gets to read about the sleuthing trail I followed to locate the happy recipient.
What do you do when you’re inspired to share the sheaves of notes, the piles of photos, the entire accumulation of your family’s past? You can take the traditional routes—planting information on a displayed family tree, framing photos, building a website, or slipping the whole shebang into scrapbook pages.
It started with a letter saying someone had located Gary Miracle’s dog tags and wanted to return them—thirty years after Miracle’s death in Vietnam.
For Karen Kolbe, the recipient of the letter and Miracle’s sister, the message was a mixed blessing.
“I was stunned,” she says. “I thought why after all this time are his dog tags coming home? Why, after thirty-some years?
Not long ago, I came into possession of some photos that were taken about fifty years ago by my grandparents—pictures of a vacation through the southwest. My grandmother, looking quite a bit younger than I remember her, was climbing on a large road sign. I think it said “Welcome to Arizona” or the like.
I discovered my love of genealogy while in college. By then, many of my older relatives were deceased. Pop Pop, however, lived until my senior year, and toward the end of his life, he told me the tale of his dad, my great-grandfather, Pre ston McEady.
Preston, said Pop Pop, was a short, brown-skinned man with an untalkative nature and an ungodly temper.
Ready to tone up your family history physique?
When we’re working out our family histories, we want results—and we want them yesterday. But sometimes we’re our own worst enemies. We hesitate. We procrastinate. We hem and haw. We even close our minds to certain details or limit ourselves to a few tried and true methods of research.
How do we get over these hurdles? Empowerment.
What makes a perfectly reasonable family shuck indoor plumbing, fast food, and cell phones to live as pioneers in west Texas? The same thing that drives a museum curator to turn Buffalo Soldier and a college student to relive World War I—a desire to immerse themselves in family history.
Lisa Cooke knows firsthand that there’s some good in television.