What happens when there is no heir apparent, but the found item is just too good to dismiss?
It happens sometimes. I work on an orphan heirloom case in an attempt to locate the descendants of the original owner of a family treasure only to discover that there are no descendants. The line has died out—and possibly even the branches most closely associated with it. What then?
Selective breeding. If you think it’s a solely foreign concept, don’t kid yourself. It happened everywhere—even, as one researcher discovered, in America.
My grandfather died when his wife and children were still quite young and America was in the grip of the Great Depression. At the time, fatherless families had few options for financial assistance.
Family history clues can be anywhere. An old recipe card may note “these were always served by cousin Mary McGuire” or “Aunt Susie made this every Thanksgiving.” So where do you go from there?
1. Start at the beginning. I was told that Bertha Christine Molzen Deschner, born 1880, wrote the recipe on this page. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I recalled a Kansas connection.
Life wasn’t always dreamy—but, for a family historian, even the less-than-perfect times may have had a silver lining.
It is easy to romanticize the lives of our ancestors. We like to think of them as hard-working, independent people.
Who: Lynne Cheney—author, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and wife of Vice President Dick Cheney
What: Blue Skies and No Fences: A Memoir of Childhood and Family
Why: “When I began writing my memoir of childhood in Wyoming, I realized how much both my husband and I owe to our forebears who made the journey west, often despite pretty awful circumstances.
“You’ve won a trip to Hawaii!”
For most people, a message like this would instantly conjure up images of warm beaches, white sand, sunshine, and tropical drinks.
And then there is me.
The Hawaii I want to see lies high above Honolulu, in the crater of a volcano where a 30-foot woman carved in stone stands sentinel.
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?