Ancestry Magazine

Ever get the feeling you’re being led?

You drive into a cemetery with no idea how to find your ancestors’ gravesites. You stop the car and step out. The tombstone of your great-great-grandmother is in front of you.

You visit a place where you’ve never been, yet unaccountably sense that you’re home. As if you’ve seen it all in a dream, you can picture what’s waiting around the bend. And you’re right.

You open a book at random that lists 250,000 immigrants—and stare at the names of your great-grandparents.

Why does it happen?

Henry Z “Hank” Jones, genealogist, lecturer, and former actor, calls this “the Twilight Zone of genealogy.” He has collected hundreds of such stories for a pair of books, Psychic Roots and More Psychic Roots, and he can’t stop collecting them—he’s up to 1,300 now.

“This is an area filled with charlatans,” Hank acknowledges, but in the tales he collects—ones in which serendipitous events encompass everything from lucky breaks to ghostly encounters—“there is a core that is really amazing,” he says. “And a lot of times these things happen to people who pride themselves on being logical.”

Twisting Fate

Joyce A. Fleming Kelley’s family history pursuits were no secret in her workplace. So when a co-worker’s husband picked up a book at an estate sale that included the Baker surname—a family name that resided in Joyce’s and her husband’s lines—the colleague asked Joyce if she wanted to see the book. Joyce, of course, said yes.

On her lunch break, Joyce began looking through the book. When she reached page six, “I about fell off my chair,” she says. The family tree began with Francis Baker, born in 1611—a direct ancestor of Joyce’s husband.

“I couldn’t believe that it came into my hands,” Joyce says. She can’t explain how it happened, but on one point she is firm: “I don’t believe it was coincidence. I think this book was put into my hands by more than coincidence.”

Encountering Chances

How important is serendipity to genealogy? Says Hank, “It’s a big part of life.” And being open to these experiences, he believes, is “part of your life’s journey.”

Willingness to journey is also important. Diane Raymond of Champaign, Illinois, once held a job in which she cleaned houses after estate sales. In one house, Diane found a trove of papers she couldn’t bear to throw out. “The bank considered them worthless,” she says. “I didn’t.”

The find included photographs, news clippings, a diary that began in 1937, and a journal of correspondence over the years compiled by a woman named Mabel Moore. Diane started reading the diary and its descriptions of daily life, and the people in it “became like my family,” she says. She held onto the documents for years. Then, on a whim one Memorial Day, Diane and her husband decided they would try to locate the family from the diary.

The couple drove 200 miles to the tiny town where the Moores had lived. “It took a good long time to get there,” Diane remembers. When they arrived, they found none of the addresses mentioned in the journal were still there. But they found the church, which had a cemetery alongside, full of Memorial Day visitors. Diane and her husband located some Moore headstones and came upon a well-dressed couple—Mabel’s family. Mabel was still alive, they said, though elderly and frail.

Diane went to her car, retrieved the papers and photos, and spread them on the ground. “I was just about in tears,” she says; the family was ecstatic.

Drawing Luck

Diane believes that fate made her decide to look for the family on that particular day. But, as Hank likes to point out with the help of a quote from Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.”

“Genealogy,” says Hank, “is still a science. Everything has to be backed up with a source.” Had Joyce not done her homework, she would have never known about the Baker surname in her husband’s line. If Diane hadn’t already familiarized herself with the

Still, serendipity was integral to the final successes of both researchers. Lesson learned? “If you get a hunch, follow it,” says Hank, who, himself, no longer asks why certain events just seem to happen, dropping us in the right place at the right time with the right frame of mind. “Just believe this stuff happens and enjoy it,” he says. “Our ancestors want to be remembered.”

Jennie Kaufman is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, New York.