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.
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.
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.
How often does a plain brown envelope reveal a good story, some historical scandal, and a few too many wives?
Like a few other treasures I’ve received through the years, this one—the pension file of Civil War veteran John Anthony Vanderpool—arrived in a plain brown envelope. It came from the National Archives, cost me a small fortune, and was worth every nickel.
Editor’s note: When we asked for family legends, you sent us hundreds of stories—here’s the first of many we’ll be featuring (this one answered by expert Ceil Wendt Jensen). If you have a legend you’d like us to prove, send the story and your contact information to editor@ancestrymagazine.com. Due to the volume of submissions, we won’t be able to answer every one.
