Ancestry Magazine

Perhaps finding myself a thousand miles away from everyone when I was just a bride started my deep longing to connect with family past and present. At first, my main connections to my family, my history, and my home were old-fashioned handwritten letters and an occasional (then expensive) phone call.

Fortunately, the genealogy bug bit me early enough in life so that I was able to get some starting information from two aunts before they passed away. I never met my father’s sister, but I cherish the letters she sent me as they were filled with key facts that were critical in learning more about my grandparents who died long before I was born.

Locating and communicating with relatives—some of whom we’ve never had a chance to meet—is much easier now. In the 1970s, genealogical research could often be an arduous shot in the dark. We were dependent on the post office to send and receive letters. Waiting for an answer that may or may not come was always agonizing. Sending away to a clerk’s office for a birth, marriage, or death record was an expensive gambling venture—there were no online indexes in those days, so you couldn’t be certain if the record you requested even existed, and, like today, the offices still charged you whether or not a record was found.

If you lived near a region of the National Archives or a library with a microfilm reader and lending privileges, you could borrow microfilm and read microfilmed census records—during library hours. But to locate an individual in any given census year, you had to first get the appropriate rolls of film for the right state, county, and municipality. Then you had to roll through page after page of handwritten names. After hours of eyestrain, you would—if you were lucky—find your person of interest. Since photocopy technology was in its infancy and very expensive, you’d still have to hand copy what you found.

Fast Forward
Today, things are different. While we still don’t have a plethora of vital records available online, and most repositories still keep your money when a record is not found, we take fewer of those shots in the dark. We can go online to learn what records are available, where we’ll find them, and for what years before we make a request.

It takes about five minutes to find the person on Ancestry.com that it took five days or even five weeks to find before digitized records. (It always seemed to take me a long time since I was forever ordering the wrong film first; it was hard to know which film would cover which area, especially in cities.)

I can’t tell you the exact day that family history research changed courtesy of the digitized records, but it didn’t happen all at once. Ancestry.com put its first records online ten years ago and started the evolution. But the truly magic moment personal research changed is unique to each of us—even for those of us who’ve worked with digitized records from their infancy.

My Moment
By 2002, I had been looking for my great-grandmother Emma Chouanniere for thirty-one years. Her married name is French and often misspelled. She disappeared from the census after 1880, and I had no idea where she went even though I looked in every source I could find. Late one night, she unexpectedly appeared on my computer screen—on a Brooklyn (NY) RootsWeb mailing list. The list, transcribed from newspapers by volunteers, gave only the date of her death, that she was buried from St. Mary’s Church, and that the funeral was in Calvary Cemetery. After so many years of unsuccessful searching, I felt sure that she had moved away from Brooklyn, or that she was lying somewhere in an unmarked grave. Now I had something.

Armed with information from RootsWeb, I was able to go to the Municipal Archives, City of New York with the exact death date and place needed to get her death certificate.

Juliana’s James
My daughter Juliana Szucs Smith has her own tale:

As the Ancestry Weekly Journal editor, I often write about my Kelly ancestors because they’re so difficult to find. They have unimaginative names like James, Elizabeth, Katherine, Mary, another James, and another James. And they decided to settle in the most populous city in the United States, along with about a bazillion other Kellys. Because of the common names and the challenges of New York City research, I wasn’t too optimistic about my chances for success with this family.

On the day before my birthday in 2005, I was going through the list of new databases on Ancestry.com. The Emigrant Savings Bank database immediately caught my interest. I had read about these records and hoped to find a way to search them one day. The Emigrant Savings Bank was founded in New York City by the Irish Emigrant Society in 1850. I quickly searched for James Kelly. Unlikely as it may seem, on the third hit, I knew that I’d found my ancestor. This incredible record included all the names of his children—and in the exact order of their births. Their first names are not unique, but having them all listed together on this digitized original record was too much of a coincidence. And there, too, was his wife listed with her previously unknown maiden name. The document also noted that she was dead at the time the record was created in November 1859. The most exciting news was that the family had “arrived at Halifax about thirty years ago,” from Glackmore, County Donegal, Ireland.

Juliana couldn’t wait to share the news with me. The ink on the printout of the newly found information wasn’t even dry when I received a long distance call from her. We have shared a lot of great finds in our years of family researching together, but her discovery that night was an especially thrilling surprise. Neither of us had held much hope for sorting out “our James Kelly” from the seventy-eight others of the same name who were living in New York City at the time. And, she says, “It was the best birthday present ever.”

Connecting Communities
Communication has always been vital to the success of genealogists, and the Internet facilitates it well. Communities have and continue to develop because of the Internet, and success stories are more common every day.

My own success on my maternal grandmother Catherine Huggins Dennis’s line also started with a list on RootsWeb. It ended with the experience of a lifetime.

When I started my search, I didn’t know where Catherine was from, but I did have her death date. I found a newspaper obituary via RootsWeb that indicated she was from County Westmeath and I learned that she had come to the United States when she was five years old.

But because of a good friend who communicated with me—electronically nonetheless—from Dublin, I was able to take a dream trip to see the place in Ireland where Catherine lived as a girl, where she was baptized, where her parents were married, and the church registers themselves. It was an experience I’ll cherish forever.

Myra’s Milestones
Myra Vanderpool Gormley has some fascinating success stories, too. As a regular contributor to Ancestry Magazine, editor of the RootsWeb Review, and a former Los Angeles Times Syndicate columnist—her colorful family tree gets plenty of exposure.

But it took a few tries for Myra, who had been researching her family for about thirty-five years, to be convinced of the genealogical value of the Internet. The following three incidents, says Myra, solidified the deal:

I lost my great-grandpa Francis Marion Hensley after the Civil War somewhere between Georgia in 1860 and Alabama in 1880. Even after the 1870 every-name index to the census came out I couldn’t find him. I checked Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, and even California—the popular western migration trail. Finally I tried all states. Nada.

I decided to search for his oldest son who was born after the Civil War. His name was Robert Lee Hensley, but he went by Lee. Bingo—I found Lee with his parents. It turns out great-grandpa and family had removed to Lincoln County, Kansas, and there they were in 1870. I learned that his father was indexed as “Mark Hensley” in the 1870 census. It turned out that great-grandpa went by his middle name, Marion. I f you saw the scribbling, you could see how easy it was to misread his name as “Mark.”

Myra explained that the steps she had to take would have been impractical—a nearly impossible time commitment—had she not been using digital indexes. The same thing happened to her again when she was looking for her family’s horsethief, a tale she relayed in her January/February 2006 “Digging Deeper” column in Ancestry Magazine. “I found [him] by exploring the database at RootsWeb for the Leavenworth Prison records. I found a picture, too,” she says.

But the moment for Myra with the most impact came via communication—an e-mail message about a family Bible:

One morning I opened my e-mail, and a cousin of a cousin of a cousin said, “We’ve found the Awtrey/Bankston family Bible. Want a copy?”

Did I want a copy? After twenty-five years of researching that family? Sure.

The grandson of one of the cousins who found the old Bible in Granny’s attic scanned it and sent it to us. The Bible was the marriage Bible of my ancestors who were married in May 1800. It listed their father’s name (and yes, I was right) and all their children and their spouses.

[That Bible] had been handed down through five generations—of daughters. There is no way in the old days before mailing lists, message boards, e-mails, and postings, that I would have been identified as a cousin to be given a photocopy of the information or even an extract. And this way I obtained a scanned image of that Bible.

Ever Evolving
There are so many ways that the Internet has worked its magic to help each of us change how and what we do, often from the comforts of our homes. We can talk to people we’ve never met—people across the world. We can search for records we never knew existed or that we merely had a hunch we might be able to find. We can share photos, memories, documents, stories, and experiences cheaply, and in seconds, that once would have taken more time and money than most of us could have spared. We can reach out to family lines never considered practical before.

And there’s one more thing that digitized records do so well—reach a new generation of genealogists. I’ll never deny, dismiss, nor regret my own experiences, both frustrating and wonderful, conducting family history research before records went online. But back in my days as a mother of four young daughters who’d yet to reach school age, finding the time to go to a library or a society meeting was impossible. My quests went cold.

Today, all it takes to get started is a computer, an Internet connection, and a desire to learn more about generations past. For the new mother or father, the grandmother, the uncle, the children, and the grandchildren, these are traits, not challenges. Placing family history back in the home with family, no matter how spread out that family, is natural. Its effect, however, is magic.

Loretto “Lou” Szucs is the executive editor of Ancestry Magazine.