"How Far Back?"

 

The other night, I became my husband's plus-one at an event hosted by an organization he advises. At such social gatherings filled with people I don't know, conversation invariably turns to, "what do you do?" When my answer is genealogy, now, thanks to multiple television series, the response has moved far beyond the inevitable question of past decades, "genealogy, what's that?" The question has now advanced to, "Oh? How far back have you gone?"

While I like to spread the word about family history, even that question used to make me wince. Genealogy for me has never been a race to the past. I don't like to get hyper-fixated on one ancestral line. Especially for those who solely trace their surname, my answer would have been beyond boring; that patriline for me has been an immovable brick wall up until only recently, thanks to DNA testing.

With this month's Twelve Most Wanted focus on Elizabeth Plummer, however, I'm actually approaching a fairly decent answer. No, I haven't traced my line to Charlemagne—though there are signs someone has in Elizabeth's case—and I certainly haven't been so bold as to presume connections to Adam (or even Eve). But I'd say approaching the 1600s in colonial Maryland is far more distant than my mother-in-law ever hoped I'd get with her research.

For that advance, I have many to appreciate. First is to be thankful for those who helped launch me on my research journey in those first formative years—everyone from the librarian who launched my eight-year-old self from the children's library across the hall to where the "grown-ups" went to get their books, to the many online friends in genealogy forums of the early nineties.

Mostly, I'm grateful for the pioneers of online family history resources. Just the other day, I met with our webmaster as our genealogy society prepares to launch an updated version of our website, and we found ourselves discussing broken links to bygone sites of online genealogy's formative years like RootsWeb. Before that, people during the earliest years of publicly-accessible online technology experimented with "listservs" and social forums where newbies could ask questions without fear of blowback, trolls, or other forms of techno-rudeness. People helped people find their roots.

Beyond that, I'm ecstatic about those technology whizzes who kept experimenting over the decades, bringing us gifts like the first online searchable 1880 census index at FamilySearch.org. We've come a long way since then, of course, and we've not stopped improving yet. I'm over the top about FamilySearch's Full Text Search, which has made excerpts from those billions of pages of digitized documents from around the world find a home in my very own family tree.

And just like that, a will drawn up by a man who died in the 1690s gives me in the twenty-first century a snapshot of his family portrait. In words, of course—but just imagine how hard it would have been to find those specific words by a mission to personally access and read all pertinent record sets without that computer-assisted direction.

To say that I found Thomas Plummer's 1694 will is not entirely correct. FamilySearch.org found it. While in answer to a trivial question posed by a stranger at a party, I can say "eighth great-grandfather," it was really all those dedicated computer engineers whose efforts over decades have yielded us the ability to go that far back—with ease.