Sometimes getting past that difficult family history hurdle means enlisting someone other than family.
My grandparents’ farmhouse stood outside North Branch, New Jersey, a village settled by the Dutch. Its thick Dutch-brick walls reputedly hid several walk-in fireplaces. Its hand-fashioned windowpanes offered rippled views of the old water pump and outhouse in the back.
Recently, I received an e-mail from Andy Likins of Colorado that got me thinking. He told about his good fortune—receiving a family history bonanza almost out of the blue:
Last summer, I was contacted by my father’s second cousin. He is now in his 80s, was moving into a retirement home, and wanted to pass along some family heirlooms.
How the death of a firstborn baby reveals a family’s struggle and the story behind potters’ fields.
They arrived on a wave of hope, my husband’s great-grandmother and her husband.
The Web is full of answers—as long as you know which ones to trust.
There may still be a few diehards who distrust any information obtained online, but for most of us, online databases have become a major source for indexes and images associated with family history. But can you trust the information you find in cyberspace?
The Web carries whatever a user posts without regard to quality or value.
In the 1970s, it was the open classroom. The 1980s saw no pass, no play. In the 1990s, music and art programs were forfeited for the sake of money. And today, education reform is getting hammered by school vouchers, charter schools, and “No Child Left Behind.”
So what would happen if we took education back to where it all started?
It’s April 1927, and Arie, who would one day become my grandmother, is feeling familiar labor pains, so my future granddad takes the wagon and drives very fast to get the midwife. He brings her back to their home in Morgan County, Alabama, where my mother is born. She—my mother—is very small. They say that if she had died they could have buried her in a shoe box. She’s not healthy.
Never assume a mundane project won’t turn up some wonderfully juicy details.
I thought I was well prepared for anything I might find in my family’s past.
You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ‘cause I can’t go;
I owe my soul to the company store…
From “16 Tons”
by Merle Travis
The work was dangerous. The hours long. And the slim portion of the paycheck that made its way home at the end of the month? It never seemed enough.
Mining.
The good news about this photo is that there is a note in the upper left corner that identifies who is in it.
My grandfather
M. Noonan
The bad news is that we don’t know which M. Noonan is the right one.
The owner of the photo has a list of four possible M. Noonans:
1. Maurice Noonan
b. 1831, d. 1885
2. Michael Noonan
b. 1831, d. ~1900
3. Maurice Noonan
b. 1903, d. 2004
4. Michael Noonan
b.
Lewis Hine dedicated his life to stopping child labor from behind a camera. Today, Joe Manning is dedicating his retirement to finding the children in front of Hine’s lens.
To the best of his knowledge, Joe Manning has no blood ties to anyone featured in the 50,000 child labor photos taken by Lewis Hine a century ago. But that doesn’t keep them from feeling like family.