Ann Zundel thinks family history programs can work miracles in the lives of fractured families. She sees it nearly every day: tough men moved to tears by their discoveries of ancestors who overcame incredible hardships to survive. Men who barely have a place in their present families who find a sense of self from the past.
It can be a struggle sometimes to find your own family history, but is it better on the other side—when everyone knows your family history? In 2007, Ancestry Magazine asked Christopher Haley, nephew of Roots author Alex Haley, about growing up in the Western world’s most well-known family tree.
Ancestry Magazine: What was it like having such a famous family history?
What if you could handpick the people sitting in your family tree? Would you choose rich ancestors? Beautiful ones? Ancestors who could get you the best seats at the finest restaurants or the kind whose mere mention would get you out of a parking ticket? Would healthy relatives be your choice? Great storytellers? Or would you just want to have relatives you might have had a chance to meet because they lived to be 100 years old—or more?
We challenged four family historians with the task of selecting people for their own dream trees. So who did they choose? See for yourself.
As a former reporter, I can tell you that few experiences compare with traveling to where our ancestors walked, worked, and—as humble as their home may have been—lay down to sleep every night. An old family home can be full of great finds (especially if it is still in the family) so being armed with the right tools is a must.
What would I take?
My serious efforts to learn more about my Moon ancestry began in 2003, when the company I worked for installed a group of paintings on loan from the New Britain Museum of American Art. Among them was one by a Samuel Moon. My father had often said we had a painter in our family tree, but he had no details about it.
I had looked into our tree once while visiting New York in 1997.
My love of genealogy is a gift from my grandmother. When, as a child, I spent weekends with her, she enthralled me with chicken and dumplings, stories of how her parents met, and the delicious tale of how we descended from Mayflower pilgrims. I roamed the cornfields by her house looking for lost graves and dreaming of meeting the people in Grandma’s stories.
Ready to start collecting family pictures? You’ll want to start in the present and work backward just like you do with family history.
First take a photo of every living person in your family. Use a pencil to label the back of each photo with names and dates.
Double-check your family history research—there may be images associated with yearbooks, school papers, and passports.
How close do two people have to be to claim a relationship? That really is all relative.
Based on America’s peculiar and unfortunate “drop of blood rule,” a person with a single drop of “black blood” is considered black by the majority.
That’s why Barack Obama, with an African father and a Caucasian mother, is described as “black” and is billed as a black candidate for president.
[The National Archives] is the raw essence of history—millions of documents attesting to the building of this nation and to the everyday affairs of common individuals. It is Americana at its best: the story of who we are and what we have accomplished.
If your ancestors attended Ben Reitman’s “hobo college,” shopped at the Fair department store, took in a show at the Regal Theater, or worked for Swift or Armour, you can learn more about the town they called home in the Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago. And it’s all right on your desktop.
