I have never liked the term “shirttail relative.” However unintentionally, it consigns some very interesting people to afterthought status. How many opportunities for information and illumination are lost to this dismissive epithet and its laundry overtones? You never know when a “shirttail” will turn out to be someone quite significant—someone I call a heartstring relative.
Do you laugh when you see yourself in an old photograph and wonder, “How could I have worn that?” Looking back, it is surprising to see how much clothes have changed in our lifetimes. But the same thing happened in the times of our ancestors.
Jim Killeen was satisfying his curiosity when he Googled his own name and found 24 other Jim Killeens. With little more than that name and sometimes an occupation, Jim contacted as many of them as he could track down.
Most of the Jim Killeens were skeptical, but seven eventually agreed to talk.
Still looking for ancestral treasures in a closet or attic? Family historian Craig Pfannkuche, president of Memory Trail Research, Inc., would tell you to dig deeper—into the outhouse. Outhouses, says Pfannkuche, can provide amazing information that you just won’t find anywhere else.
I remember watching my mother tear the fluffiest pancake I’d ever seen into chunks, crumbling it into the pan, sprinkling it with sugar, and serving it up with a side of family history as she talked about her own mother making Kaiserschmarren. According to Mom, the Austrian dish’s name meant Emperor’s Dessert, although in German a schmarr is also a cut or slash.
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.
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.
