Some Thoughts on "Pack Rats"

 

Pack rats—and I'm not talking about the rodent variety here—can be people prone to hoarding unnecessary items. Some avocational genealogists have been accused by family members of being guilty of that very habit, and its related downfall, inability to resist bright shiny objects. But let's think about that for a moment.

As I prepare to launch into my research topic for the coming month—the eighth of my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors for 2026—I realized I would know very little about the early years of this woman's life if it hadn't been for the propensity of her descendants to hoard such items as old letters, photos, and documents. Indeed, the very story that endears me to this woman revolves around a letter which, once received, she folded, placed back in its envelope, and carried with her for the rest of her life. It was the last word she had received from her husband before he disappeared.

Then again, it might have been near impossible to locate records back in Ireland for another of this family's ancestors, except that a pack rat descendant decided to save the little slip of paper handwritten by a priest in County Tipperary, noting the date of baptism of another relative, along with the names of his parents—maiden name for the mother, included. I have yet to find that record in its original home, either.

From letters sent home by my teenaged father-in-law during his service in the early years of World War II to letters exchanged by his great-grandparents with family and friends almost one hundred years before that point, I've gleaned much about these family members which could not otherwise have been found. Others may complain about pack rat relatives, but I for one am grateful that someone saw the value in saving "unnecessary" items.

Reviewing and Re-Reading

 

Sometimes, as I mentioned yesterday, a research proposal needs a Plan B. With Lydia Miller, my mother-in-law's brick wall second great-grandmother, we've tried our hand at looking to DNA testing, to no avail so far. It's time to review my research from last year, which means re-reading almost thirty posts on my research process recorded when I last visited the problem of finding Lydia in May of 2025.

The problem with my approach last year centered around one mistaken assumption: that Lydia had died young, at about the time she lost her first husband. It wasn't until nearly the end of last May's research project when I realized that error. Re-reading last year's posts on Lydia kept shining that glaring light in my eye, and I wince to think of all the time I lost with that limiting concept.

Still, there was much to glean from what I found last year. I'm in the process of reviewing all that exploration. The best approach now would be to recap the key points briefly, so we can launch from that position to wrap up our exploration this year.

While many details on this Miller case have changed year over year—including some assumptions originally provided in last year's ThruLines estimates, not to mention my assumption that Lydia was a young mother who died early—we'll use last year's explorations as our launching point to renew our exploration of just who Lydia's parents might have been. Tomorrow for our Miller Plan B, we'll start by laying out the main discoveries from last year's posts, so everyone can get up to speed and prepare ourselves to jump to the next step before the close of this month is upon us.

A Little Spring Cleaning Detour

 

There is a little wood and wicker three drawer cabinet which I've repurposed to store some of my research odds and ends—you know, the notes-to-self reminders that I'll do when I get a "round tuit." Evidently, I must have recently added one file folder too many, because yesterday, it began creaking. Not long afterwards, I noticed this cabinet was doing its best to imitate the Leaning Tower of Pisa. There are many instances in which history is worthy of emulation but this was not one of them. It was time to investigate.

Among all those notes-to-self in those filled drawers, I rediscovered some records gleaned from on-site research in places that ancestors used to call home. I found records from the Fort Meade Historical Society, from the little town in Florida where my McClellan ancestors once lived, and remembered our family's visit to their museum, which displayed a dentist's chair once used by my great-grandfather. From another long-distance genealogy trip, I rediscovered a map of the Roman Catholic parish in Ireland now known as Ballina-Boher, with the townland of Tountinna highlighted in yellow to draw attention to the place where my father-in-law's Tully ancestors once lived.

There were, of course, many other slips of paper, reminding me to check on specific details of this or that ancestor. From some of my earliest research forays, there were actual photocopies of documents, items which I'll now need to scan and upload to my digitized records.

Fortunately, several of these reminders have made a timely appearance, for I've already planned to work on these family lines in upcoming months. For those notes regarding my mother's family, this is a great prompt to add those maternal ancestors to my Twelve Most Wanted list for next year. There is always more work to do on these brick wall ancestors.

Organized into groups of similar tasks, these odds and ends of notes written to myself in past years are now laid out into a work flow that will hopefully vanquish the paper piles, but at the same time, looking at each one and remembering what first sparked those reminders has been a pleasant trip down my genealogical memory lane. Research may seem tedious at times—and provide me with motivation to move on to the next task when the frustration of dead ends looms—but it is always enjoyable to look back and remember the trip from beginning puzzle to latest stopping point. Somehow, a little spring cleaning detour turns out to provide me with more energy to pick up that trail once again. 

Stuck in the Murky Middle Again

 

There is a familiar pattern that appears every time I launch into new research waters. I dive in to the work, sinking deep into the middle. Surrounded by piles of documentation, the sheer number of files I still need to read seems to drown out the daylight. Right at the start, before I even know it yet, I'm stuck in the murky middle. Again.

When it seems there's no light to guide me—not even that ominous light at the end of the tunnel—by now I know to just keep plugging. So it wasn't dismaying this weekend when I pulled up my DNA matches and discovered that my seventeen suggested John Carter matches among my DNA cousins at Ancestry's ThruLines tool seem to connect through lines of descent that, well, wobble more than I'd like. Things are still murky; I can wait until that shaft of explanatory daylight makes its way through the thickness.

Not to be undone in numbers, those fifty nine DNA matches attributed to John Carter's last wife, my fifth great-grandmother Hannah Chew, have also kept me stymied. Most of them descend, as I do, from Hannah's daughter, Margaret Chew Carter. But do you think the Carters were aiming to keep things simple when they named that daughter? Of course not; papa John Carter had already named another daughter by that same first name, Margaret. Granted, she was daughter of a different wife—whoever that woman turns out to be—but that fact has seemed to evade detection by several family historians, including those who are my DNA matches.

When I face such research conundrums, I've learned that to conquer the murkiness, I first have to research my way through that messy middle. It will take wading through pages and pages of court records to organize them into categories, and by relatives, before I can comprehend how the pieces of the family story fit together. 

I admit: actually finding the records necessary for this sifting process can be headache job number one. For that heavy lifting—at least, as soon as I have reliable names, dates, and locations—I head first to FamilySearch's Full Text Search. After wandering through some wills and deeds for a few Carter family members—mostly men, not helping my goal to search for the daughters—the Full Text Search led me to a paper written by a fellow of the American Society of Genealogists. 

This typewritten report from the 1960s, though admittedly long past the 1700s of John Carter's lifetime, referred to several court records which I am keen to inspect. Yes, here comes more of the murky middle, as I pull up digitized copies of those records which haven't been lost to courthouse fires and other catastrophes, but as each document gets placed in its logical order in the timeline of the Carter pedigree, I'll hopefully begin to see a glint of that far-off light.

Some Things Just Take Time

 

There are some times, when it comes to my biweekly checkup, that I just seem to race through the records, finding new relatives to add to the family tree at every turn. That usually means I'm working on my mother-in-law's intermarried Catholic families from Pennsylvania and Ohio, where including collateral lines in their tree means adding eight to twelve children per each relative family. This time, however, I'm uncovering the secret of my own father's roots, a process shrouded in records illegible—if they can be found at all. 

Looking at the numbers after the last two weeks of searching for records in a country which once was known as Prussia reminds me: some things just take time. And researching any branch of my father's family is going to bring me face to face with that dilemma.

For instance, over the past two weeks I've only been able to add fifty one new names to my family tree. Most of those are collateral lines descended from siblings of either this month's research focus—Elżbieta Gramlewicz—or my search at the end of last month for siblings of my second great-grandmother Marianna Wojtaś. That's a far cry from the hundred or so new names I could glean by focusing on my in-laws' missing relatives. This kind of search means cranking through many records that turn out to be false leads.

Still, that tree includes 40,617 researched individuals. I can't lose sight of that. It's progress, day by day, over years of effort that can add up to a substantial—and encouraging—amount. Looking solely at the numbers for a two-week effort will never tell the story over the long haul. Genealogy takes patience, and progress is simply something we can see only when we keep at the effort with diligence.

If there was somehow a magic potion I could pour over the archives which once held the records naming my father's ancestors, I'd love to see those disintegrated papers reappear for the benefit of all of us who have Polish roots. But it simply isn't going to happen. Diligent inquiry, alertness to new record sources, willingness to explore new resources in other countries which may hold those missing records of Polish ancestors, and the ability to draw inferences from what we can find is all that is left to us. Knowing this, it is sometimes surprising to see that I've been able to find even fifty relatives to add to my tree over that two week period.

Taking the Long View

 

How often we discover one record, one document, one slip of paper, and assume in the victory of locating it that we have found the whole of an ancestor's story. In the case of several of my ancestors—especially those women of previous centuries—that simply isn't so. An example like that serves to remind us all to take the long view when documenting an ancestor's life story.

I had mentioned that problem in reviewing the research difficulties concerning one paternal ancestor, my grandfather's sister, whom the New York family called Aunt Rose. Rose went by three different married names, in addition to the name under which she had been recorded at birth, back in Poland.

To my horror, in trying to add Rose to the FamilySearch.org universal family tree, I discovered there were actually three different women entered instead of the one woman I knew by three married names. Only by demonstrating through documentation will I be able to rectify that situation and blend the three identities into one. Unfortunately, some of those documents are still beyond my grasp.

A situation like this, however, is not isolated to the irregularities of my Polish immigrant ancestors, who, to begin with, were quite reticent about revealing their true identity. Just the other day, as I experimented with a new-to-me research tool at Ancestry.com, I alluded to another example where it takes more than one document to tell the whole of a woman's story.

In eliminating duplicate entries on my in-laws' tree, I ran across several such women whom I had entered twice in that same family tree. As I reflect over the cause for some of these double entries and worked through the documentation to confirm the right display in my tree, it became obvious that following women through name changes due to multiple marriages takes time, patience—and a chain of record keeping. 

For instance—and this is a relatively easy example—my mother-in-law's great-grand aunt, Sarah Mooter, showed in one part of my tree under her maiden name with a marriage to someone named Gibson. In a separate entry, she was mother of a child with a surname of Ebner. How did all that connect? It took piecing together several documents to verify what I suspected: as often happened in that time period, a widow with children remarried, starting a second family.

While we can surmise such an expected outcome, we still need to put together the confirming paper trail. Instead of "filling in the blank," we need to insert documentation to fill in several blanks or the story is not completely told. Sometimes the fill-in-the-blank format of pre-designed genealogical programs doesn't seem to lend itself to this reality of researching our ancestors. Messy lives can't really be contained in a simple fill-in-the-blanks format. I know the still-missing parts of Aunt Rose's story are keeping me from telling her whole story. I suspect I'm not the only one whose family has such a history.

Never Too Late for Spring Cleaning

 

Spring cleaning hadn't been foremost on my mind the other day, when my niece asked for a copy of a family document. She is working on an application to become part of The Mayflower Society, and her recent request pushed me to dig out some old files I hadn't worked on for years. 

Well, maybe make that decades.

The search led me to some boxed up files which I had removed, years ago, from a file cabinet to make room for more recent records.

To my surprise, what should be the first thing my hand pulled out of that dusty box—hint: it wasn't what I was looking for—but a folder labeled "Rinehart" and some correspondence regarding Greene County, Pennsylvania.

Call that serendipity. 

In addition to a photocopied series of biographical entries from the History of Fairfield and Perry Counties, Ohio including Jesse Rinehart's entry in that 1883 book—now easily accessible thanks to Internet Archive—was a photocopied report faxed to me in 1999. I received that report from a fellow Rinehart researcher whom I had met online during those earlier days of genealogy forums and resources such as RootsWeb. He had wanted to share something written by a man named Bruce Anderson, who back in 1981 had compiled a report called "The Rineharts of Perry County, Ohio."

Yes, precisely the family I'm still puzzling over.

What was interesting about the eleven pages of that report was the reference to specific case numbers from the Perry County court system. Of course, now we have almost instant access to some of those same court records, thanks to FamilySearch.org, and specifically owing to the FamilySearch Labs' Full Text Search option. But seeing those other references tells me that there are more court records than the series I had located. There is more to search to fully grasp the entirety of that generation's history in Perry County.

The file I found in that dusty box also included a series of emails which I had exchanged with another Perry County researcher, concerning what we each had found on the Rinehart line which our families share in common. I have yet to complete that stack of reading, but I'm going through that file with a pen and some sticky notes, to mark specific details I need to confirm through documentation—now that it is so much easier to find those records online.

Some family stories we chase for a short while and catch up with the elusive answer in one quick sprint through local records. Others have us wandering in circles for decades. This Rinehart line has been one of the latter. In retrospect, I can see where some conjectures from previous decades can now be proven incorrect—but I also see some hints which, though missed in previous research rounds, may now lead to clearer answers. I'm looking forward to following those trails with fresh eyes, this time around.

No Flowery Obituaries to Mark Their Absence

 

It sometimes feels as if the family history pursuit is a chase that leads in circles. In this month's goal to determine exactly which line of the Laws family of North Carolina and Tennessee would be mine, it seems as if I haven't made much progress. Not that I haven't covered research ground; it's just that for every search term I try, it seems I round the final bend in the journey, coming back empty-handed.

There is something about Greene County, Tennessee, the place where William Laws settled his family by 1870. It seems to be a place where people may go to die—yet their demise never results in flowery obituaries, let alone a burial marker to commemorate their absence. With those items missing, my chance of uncovering clues about the dearly departed's loved ones left behind vanishes.

While I check alternate resources for such missing records—going local here for resources—I've returned to work through the seventeen Laws family DNA matches waiting for my confirmation at Ancestry's ThruLines tool. Tentative third great-grandfather William Laws may well be related to me somehow, as witnessed by the matches who claim his son Larkin Laws as their ancestor. A small victory—you wouldn't believe the tiny size of the shared centiMorgans here—but I'm glad to have one glimmer of hope. These are, after all, DNA connections at the fourth cousin level.

Documentation, however, would be nicer. And something tells me there has got to be a way to find it. Remembering that not every record is preserved online yet—despite remarkable progress by organizations such as FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, and MyHeritage.com—sometimes this dilemma calls for hands-on effort. Phone calls and emails seem so antiquated after years of instant access via online connections, but it's time to reach out and research other available avenues.

Turning Points

 

Here in the northern hemisphere, we just passed the shortest day of the year. Looking ahead, the days will get imperceptibly longer—and noticeably colder. Sometimes, those turning points can be rather obvious. Other times, the change has to overtake us before we even begin to realize what happened.

The new year is one of the more obvious turning points. Some people plan for the "new you" they will become with the flip of that special page on the calendar. I've never been one for New Year's resolutions, but this year I'm already gearing up for my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025. I've given it quite a bit of thought, ever since I realized I hadn't planned for this year's technology advances which could favorably impact my research progress. Less than one month spent on my father's ancestry this past fall and I woke up to how much more can be accomplished when newly digitized record sets become available online. The game changer is increased access.

While my numbers today for my biweekly count hardly show any turning point despite that game changer—I only added seventy nine more documented family members to my parents' tree—the steady plodding through available digitized records over the years has resulted in a tree which now totals 38,752 relatives. Besides this month's focus on First Families candidates, I also managed to work on my in-laws' tree as a follow-up to discovery of a DNA match. Seventeen new names in that tree puts the total count for my husband's lines at 37,044.

Before long, it will be decision time for a new year of research. This time, I'll know better than to slack when I think lack of records access would hold me back. Between new—or new-to-me—websites in the countries of my family's origin and AI-assisted developments like FamilySearch labs' full text search and reading capabilities, I'm looking forward to selecting the most frustrating—yet now promising—family lines for my research focus in 2025. 

Only four more days and I'll begin selections for my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025. I'm ready to reach some turning points in that constant quest to break through ancestral brick walls in the upcoming year.

Breathless Breakthroughs and Puzzling Polish Ancestors

 

The other day, I got one of those breathless emails from MyHeritage, the kind that heralds one of those big breakthrough discoveries of documents for mystery ancestors. They had found signs of my puzzling Polish ancestors, the Olejniczak family.

That might have been good news. After all, it was MyHeritage which unearthed the legal notice in a New York City newspaper announcing the fait accompli of my paternal grandfather's name change—finally, a fact I can list as duly documented instead of merely family legend.

But in this case, the discovery of Olejniczak documentation was simply the addition of those same family members in someone's family tree. Only problem was: it was my family tree!

Since I've been jumping back and forth between several tree-building services in my process to add the facts from Polish websites to my American trees, I've decided I can't simply lock those details behind the paywall on my one favored genealogical company. Thus, I've been careful to add what I'm finding to my branches of the universal tree at FamilySearch.org—which is where MyHeritage spotted the entry. In addition, I've also been building those details into my tree at MyHeritage—which prompted them to send me the notification. It goes without saying that, ditto, I've done the same at Ancestry.com. Still waiting, but soon to be accomplished, will be the same process on WikiTree. If anyone is out there—a distant cousin just waiting to be discovered—I want that fellow family history researcher to find me. We need to compare notes.

It sometimes leaves me awestruck to realize that apparently not many people—translation: no people I can find—have been researching these family lines. I wonder: did those that stayed in Poland get wiped out in the 1939 Intelligenzaktion? Or did their sons and grandsons get drafted to the other side of two of the worst wars the world has known in modern history?

As I've worked my way through the collateral lines in the Olejniczak family, I've run full speed into an invisible brick wall—not just for one person, but for a time frame after which records are simply not available to me. Perhaps, if I were able to read the Polish language, I could find my way around this records silence by searching for family names in local newspapers, but that skill is far beyond me.

In the meantime, I'm rounding out what few details I can find for each collateral line by putting them in each of these online tree-building services, linking them to any records or transcriptions I can find. While that may be a small step, it is indeed a step. Small cousin bait, of course, but something. I'm already beginning to see signs of possible Polish cousins in newer DNA matches and tree entries. The process may feel like trying to walk in hip waders with fifteen additional legs attached, but at least I'm walking forward through the muck and the mire of forsaken old records.

When the To-Do List Piles Up

It seemed like a reasonable plan: I'd limit myself to researching one ancestor per month. That way, I could focus on one specific research question, having the luxury of at least thirty days to struggle from unsolved mystery to documented answer.

You know that plan never quite works out in just the right amount of time.

Despite the best of intentions, at the end of each month, that almost-in-reach answer taunted me so much that I made an exception. I promised I'd keep on the trail of that ancestral quest—only I'd do it behind the scenes, not including it here in what has become my genealogical journal of research progress. In other words, those monthly research leftovers found themselves added to my to-do list. And that research to-do list has piled up to an unmanageable level.

Today, I thought I'd brace myself and take a tally of all the tabs on my computer marking tasks yet awaiting completion. Reaching back to January, there's the question about my fifth great-grandfather John Carter: did he have two wives or three? And which of his children belonged to which mother? Could we devise a DNA project to resolve that mystery?

Piled up with that Carter question, I had promises made to myself from previous years to continue my search for all Broyles descendants from the second Germanna settlement, since I've since met several distant Broyles cousins both online and in real life. "Are you my cousin?" became an oft-repeated question this year, and I simply needed to find a way to answer that. Hence, a research project behind the scenes which has stretched well over a year now.

A DNA match mess over genetic cousins from my maternal grandfather's Laws family—which I haven't written about in years—has kept me playing "what if" games with data from those matches off and on. I need to approach the "off" side of that equation soon. Perhaps this needs to be a Twelve Most Wanted target for next year—for once and for all.

On my mother-in-law's side of the family, several projects await my attention. It seems each time I work on one of her ancestors, a multitude of DNA matches appear in my husband's accounts and call me to add dozens of collateral lines to her tree. I've got tabs open on my laptop to keep me working on her Snider, Metzger, Ijams, Howard, Flowers, and Gordon lines.

And oh, now that I think of it, even last month closed out without my escaping those lingering to-do wishes. After piecing together James and Mary Kelly's story from my father-in-law's family in every which way I could, I tried tracing all their known descendants. I am not done with that process. Add yet another task to the ever-growing to-do list.

Perhaps it will be time to play catch-up. Or harvest all these notes to help in creating my Twelve Most Wanted projects for 2025. I'd say there are enough of them to last me another year. And then some.

Some Pre-Thanksgiving Thanks

 

We may be weeks away from what is usually considered the "holiday season," but I've lately had some thanksgiving thoughts. Perhaps it was because I was recently wandering the aisles of a go-to gift store, noticing not only the Halloween decorations, but everything one would need to prepare a home for Christmas, as well. Or perhaps it is simply because I know our neighbors to the north will soon be settling in for their own Thanksgiving dinner in Canada in little more than a week.

Truth be told, what really inspired my thankfulness was the effort I've had to expend on finding those Polish ancestors of my father. If I didn't know so much about how difficult it is to research Irish ancestry, I might have wished my paternal grandfather's made-up tale about his descent from the Emerald Isle were the true one, not the secret we cousins unearthed about his true roots in Poland.

In pursuit of the truth, my task is now to toggle between three online genealogical services—Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, and FamilySearch.org—to piece together records to confirm just one of my Polish ancestors, Franziska Olejniczak. You'd think a surname as unusual as that would give me a shining green light pointing the way through the genealogical darkness. But no, solely because the resources are so lacking. And that's where the thankfulness comes in.

I've had ample opportunities to research my mother's made-in-America lines, going back for centuries with hardly a hiccup compared to the difficulties I've encountered with Polish research. Granted, networking with others who are researching their Polish records has pointed the way to some websites hosted in Poland, such as the Poznan Project and BaSIA, the Database of Archival Indexing System. These are available, for the most part, because of volunteers who are over there and can access and transcribe the records that I can't access because I am thousands of miles away. For that, I am thankful.

Even though I am currently frustrated at what seems to be the lack of access to records—or perhaps the lack of records, themselves—this dearth points me to the thankfulness-worthy realization that, in America, we have such a tradition of record keeping that we can, if we so choose, trace our family lines back through so many generations. While we may grumble about bureaucracy or government intrusion into private lives, we still have had the benefits of stability which enabled us to preserve such records safely against the ravages of time, tumult, and terrors.

I may grumble while I jump from website to website, trying to reconcile records and locations while using online translation services, but deep down inside and despite the frustration, I'm reminded there is still a lot a genealogist can be thankful for. Though the going may be far slower—and definitely more awkward—it is still possible to garner the records and piece together a family's story. In North America, sure. But also in the places our ancestors once called home.

What Makes You Wonder?

 

Wonder is a key necessity for those wanting to discover their family history. So much more than simply building a family tree, or "doing genealogy," exploring our ancestors' history calls for a sense of wonder.

In my case, what makes me wonder the most is how people in my family connected—not just through family relationships, but through time and place as well. Even though Theresa Blaising was not a blood relative of the Stevens family, I wondered just how she connected, how her path crossed with her future husband,  John Kelly Stevens. Even more so, I wondered how she traveled to Indiana at all, considering she was French-born and unlikely to have landed in a place like New Haven. Wonder presumes there is a story and seeks to uncover it.

There are other ways of connection I wonder about. Last week, my husband and I were traveling in upstate New York and had the chance to visit with the daughter of one of his Stevens cousins and her family. Since we had never traveled that way before, we were meeting the children for the first time—upon which opportunity my husband got the chance to explain to some eager young learners just what it meant to be a first cousin twice removed.

During that visit, I was struck with how similar some of the boys looked to the son of one of my husband's sisters, when he was that age. It immediately reminded me of what I've seen through DNA testing: how even a small amount of shared DNA could bring out such similar facial details or personality characteristics as to surprise us when we see them in distant relatives. Wonder propels us into areas of discovery we might not previously have expected to explore.

Those types of connections make me wonder. Even more so, they send me in pursuit of answers to those questions I'm wondering about. Wonder is a force propelling research further, providing tools to navigate the exploration.

Being there, wherever "there" is for your family's story, can awaken a form of wonder, too. When we flew in to Buffalo, the hotel where we spent our first night was actually in a nearby town which name I recognized from researching a collateral line in my own father's Polish immigrant family history. What brought that branch of the family to the opposite side of the state from where siblings had chosen to settle? Actually following those paths and being in those places, though decades or even centuries later, can awaken wonder about what that place held for our traveling ancestors. Wonder calls us to reach out and touch, to share the experience, to see an ancestor's life through their own eyes, if possible.

Each one of us, in our pursuit of our family's stories, may have a different "wonder" about the people we are researching. But whatever that "wonder" may be for you, I'm glad that the "wonder" is there. Wonder allows us to preserve that story of family through the generations, to pass it on to yet another generation removed—to give them a chance to wonder, as well. 

"Or Related Field"

 

Though I didn't realize it at the time, I spent my college years majoring in "or related field." For those of us who chose unusual—read: not in demand—fields of study to pursue, that became our unintended consequence for the choices our eighteen-year-old selves made. Fortunately, there are indeed job opportunities out there for "or related field," or I would have starved to death long ago. It's the power to be flexible—or as some put it, the ability to reinvent ourselves—that allows us to take any steps forward.

There is a second benefit to such flexibility. For each time we step up and bring our talents to bear in those "unrelated" disciplines, we enrich the project as much as the project benefits us. The context in which we move forward now includes more than one point of view, more than one protocol, more than one regimen. The context now becomes enriched.

While the pursuit of genealogy is avocational for me, I have watched the field pass through seasons in which those bringing their "or related field" perspective have enriched the result for all of us. I recall when I first began researching my family's history in earnest. It seemed, in those early-Internet years of genealogy forums, that I was routinely making the acquaintance of other researchers who were, in their "other" life, doctors or lawyers or professors or librarians. If "genealogist" had a job description then, these would be the candidates eligible to apply on account of their qualifications in other fields.

Yet, when we think about it, to effectively make use of all genealogical tools available to us, that is what we need: the legal chops to digest the verbiage of courtroom procedures, the medical know-how to read those illegible diagnoses scrawled on our ancestors' death certificates—or the medical history smarts to translate old terminology into current-day disease nomenclature. We need the librarian's ability to sniff out just the right resource, no matter how rare, to reveal the specific information we're seeking. And we can certainly use the scientist's procedural rigor for formulating and then testing our research hypotheses.

Maybe the ideal genealogist would be the one person who harnesses each of these research superpowers—but it would be the rare person who has all these skills finely honed and always at the ready. Rather, it might be more helpful to see genealogy as a team process, where each of us brings our special perspective to the table to help each other attain our research goals more effectively. After all, each of us has a special "or related field" skill which can broaden the approach of our fellow researchers. We can enrich the process of working together to help each other jump over those ancestral brick walls.

 

It's NOT All About Me

 

Every so often, while I'm working on my family tree online, a window will pop up with a question: someone would like me to complete a market survey about my experience in using that genealogy service. While I'm not averse to helping a company offer exactly what its customers find useful, I began to stale on such questionnaires when I realized one thing: the anticipated average subject in those surveys does not seem to be on the same wavelength as I am.

To put it bluntly, I do not "do" genealogy to feel better about myself. I don't spend hours working on my tree, or squinting my way through impossible-to-read hundred-year-old records, just to get a better sense of how I fit in. It's not a matter of personal pride. Or belonging. Or anything about me. In fact, my motivation would be just the opposite: piecing together the story of my ancestors is not all about me in the least. I do it for the sheer amazement I feel when I learn about the fascinating people whose names fill the branches in my family tree.

It's about the stories. Their stories. More than that, it's about the obstacles each ancestor needed to overcome in his or her life—with each life very different than the life, even, of close kin. As each life unfolds, it beckons me onward through a story much like those which make us wonder, "What happened next?"

How can I answer survey questions such as the ones I've seen lately, when all I can offer in response is "None of the above"?

Granted, I may be an outlier. Perhaps, addicted to solving puzzles. Or contributing to the community effort of making available the stories I've found that might turn out to be about someone else's ancestor. Whatever it is, it's a quest to discover stories, especially the stories of people who continue to amaze me.

Take this month's research project: finding the details about my third great-grandmother Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro Rainey's mother, Mary Meriwether Gilmer. I already know I am heading into a family filled with surnames which appeared in our country's history—but whether this line leads to those distant connections, I don't yet know.

As I start the month, one task I tackle is to look at all the DNA matches for that specific ancestor. In the case of Mary Meriwether Gilmer, the children from her two marriages bring me enough descendants to yield seventy seven DNA matches—and that is just at Ancestry.com's ThruLines database. I suspect I'll be quite busy this month, behind the scenes, just checking the records to confirm that many matches from one company's test, let alone the other four where I've tested.

Along the way, as I reach out to other researchers on any given month's Twelve Most Wanted project (or those others reach out to me), the collaboration brings a more multi-dimensional view of the ancestor in question. The stories are still in the shadows, but as the facts emerge, the tale takes shape, and I once again fall in love with the rich and varied details which make that ancestor exactly the unique individual whom I'm now discovering. It's for their lives, their story, that I keep at this process. And that is reward enough.

Family History Among Friends

 

I've often wondered what responses I would receive if, at our local genealogical society meetings, I'd ask what drew a member into the search for the family's history. It could all start as an open-ended question, like: "I started researching my family's history because...." 

Or, "I started researching my family's history when...." 

Perhaps I could shake things up a bit by posing this version: "I started researching my family's history despite...."

No matter what version that question would take, the answers most certainly would be varied. If we began that family history journey of our own volition, each of us most certainly took our first step for a reason different than the others in our group. I've love to hear them all.

Yesterday, I did have the chance to hear from one fellow society member's perspective, and it was a fully enjoyable two-hour-long visit at a favorite coffee shop. What we don't know about each other—even long-standing members of the same organization—can turn out to be fascinating. I'm not sure why we never get to that point of sharing our own stories, but hopefully I can remedy that, at least for one small group. 

Though genealogy is often a solitary pursuit, sharing our victories—and research escapades—can do wonders for each of us, as well as help us encourage each other to keep at the chase. Who knows? Perhaps we will even discover a previously-unknown family connection with our fellow society members in the process.

What if There Weren't any Stories?

 

Learning the life stories of ancestors helps us understand them better. Perhaps that's why I feel such a need to focus on the stories. And it doesn't take long to find yet another story to share from the family tree—at least it seems that way.

Once I say that, though, someone inevitably responds to that statement with the question: What if there weren't any stories in their family's past? 

Most of the people who present me with that question usually rehearse their ancestral heritage: just "plain ol' farmers" who had no claim to fame, who spent their entire life working the land. What gets discounted with that frame of mind is the fact that, no matter how "average" or "boring" a life might seem to be, it can still come with the ups and downs, the disappointments, the hopes, the small triumphs, the perseverance-in-spite-of that made that person what, in the end, he or she turned out to be.

My dad, for instance, was a rather quiet man. I knew he had been a lifelong musician—well, except for one brief moment in his life when he tried to work at a "real" job—but because he never talked about himself, I never learned, for instance, about his chances for significant recognition for his talent, or even the sad episode in his younger years of losing a firstborn child. Now, of course, thanks to digitized records, I can find stories such as these—or at least learn how to read between the lines when the script remains silent—and begin to see him in a more three-dimensional light. Where no story seemed to exist, multiple story lines begin to appear.

When we examine the process of how a family member evolved into the person we may later have come to know them as, it makes it slightly more possible for us to understand—or, if you will forgive the term, how we can relate to that person from previous generations. That process, incidentally, is what is filled with stories. We just need to find the way to discover the details, follow the unfolding of the situation, ask questions and learn from what we observe—whether from family diaries and letters, from newspaper reports or old photo albums and scrapbooks, or even from dull, dry, government records. The story is there; it's our task to find it.

Lost to Antiquity?

 

Yesterday, I was reading an intriguing article posted on the BBC website. It was about Tyrian purple—not the color itself, but the entire process of producing the dye that colored materials so remarkably as to remove them to the sole domain of royalty and the powerful (or, as we'd say in our day, the rich and famous). Ever since the fall of Constantinople, the craft of producing the dye—and with it, the entire merchandising of the fabric it yielded—has been lost to antiquity.

The very name itself—Tyrian purple—harkens back to biblical days, with "Tyrian" referring to the ancient Phoenician city-state of Tyre, and calls to mind the saga of the Apostle Paul's journey to the Roman colony of Philippi where he met a woman named Lydia, a "seller of purple." According to the BBC article, Tyrian purple was worth more than three times its weight in gold, making it a pricey commodity, indeed. Yet, for all that notoriety, it seems no one today is quite sure of how it was originally manufactured.

There are many aspects of the ancient world lost to us, but it doesn't take antiquity for items we consider precious to be lost. I'm thinking now of a footnote affixed to a transcribed index of original deeds and land grants of the Watauga Purchase, in the region which included what became Washington County, Tennessee. According to that explanation at the very end of the index, page 112 of the original Deed Book A included this handwritten note:

The chrystian name of the grantee in ye Deed from Robison to fitzgarald appears to be lost by the wearing of ye paper....

Makes me wonder what else might have been lost "by the wearing of ye paper" over time. I'm thinking particularly of my Tilson ancestors, who likely moved to the area after those original deeds were drawn up, but certainly by the earliest years of the 1800s. Or for their earlier forebears, who settled in the pioneer regions of southwest Virginia long before that time. For that matter, what about all of us whose genealogical losses over time might have involved those oft-mentioned courthouse fires or other disasters?

Just like the inquisitive researcher featured in the BBC article on re-discovering a craft lost to antiquity such as the making of Tyrian purple, we are seeing inventive researchers come up with ways to discover our roots which in the past we may have felt were lost to time. Genealogical "archaeologists" are digging up past records which were once inaccessible, or illegible, or otherwise considered irreplaceably lost, and piecing together stories we thought we'd never learn. It's an exciting time for those of us yearning to discover more about our ancestors and their past. 

Celebrating Mile Markers

 

A memory from childhood surfaced last week while driving through Kansas for a cousin's wedding: watching mile markers fly by on the side of the road. As the never-changing landscape tricked me into thinking we weren't gaining any distance whatsoever, the changing numbers on the mile markers reassured me that we were, indeed, making progress.

Now that I'm back home and finally attending to my current weekend project of sorting through DNA matches, I realize it would help to celebrate passing those significant mile markers here, too.

I've been using Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool to sort through my many mystery cousins and place them in my family tree. I've felt like I am still stuck in the same place as I was, almost a year ago, in working on the ThruLines suggestions for my Tilson ancestors. Granted, my current target is Peleg Tilson, my fourth great-grandfather, so any cousin matches I find would be very distant cousins, indeed. Taking the time to trace each of seventy three DNA matches' line of descent from Peleg to the present is time consuming—at least, if that effort includes locating supporting documentation for each step through the generations.

For instance, in the way ThruLines organizes their readout for a given most recent common ancestor, the cousins are separated into subsets based on the respective child of the ancestor from whom they descend. So, in Peleg's case, I started at the top of the list with his oldest daughter Jennet. That meant tackling a list of twenty five matches, just from Jennet's line.

Clue: that took lots of time. It is not simply a matter of taking Ancestry's word for it that a line of descent is just how the majority of their subscribers said it was. I needed to find documentation before adding anyone into this collateral line.

I don't remember when I began the process, but when I finally closed out the last of Jennet's descendants in my match list, it occurred to me that it might be more encouraging to take time to celebrate passing that mile marker. After all, vetting twenty five cousin matches was worth celebrating—and I'll certainly need the encouragement to tackle the other nine of Peleg's children represented among my remaining DNA matches in the Tilson line.

Starting this weekend, I finally began the first of my DNA matches linked to Peleg's second daughter, Ruth Tilson. While this second iteration will certainly not be as taxing as the effort to complete the list for her sister Jennet's descendants, there are at least five DNA matches descended from Ruth's line. By the time I complete that list, albeit a far shorter one than my first challenge, I will take a bit of time to pat myself on the back for having completed that series, as well. We all need some encouragement along the way.

While some of the other Tilson lines descending from Peleg have only a few matches to confirm, there are two more which include at least ten DNA matches apiece. Working through each of these lines will help add to the records I've amassed concerning the collateral lines in this extended family. While that is encouraging in itself—it helps me meet one of my overarching research goals—it also occurred to me that if we don't celebrate our own research progress, perhaps there might not be much progress to follow. The whole tedious process reminds me that sometimes we need to be our own best cheerleaders.  

Gotta Have a Plan

 

What do you do when you are about to embark on a journey, but you are not exactly sure where you are headed? I'd say, even in such doubtful circumstances, it's important to formulate a plan. So, step one as I launch into this adventure to learn more about Aunt Rose: outline a plan for how to approach this month's exploration into the life of Aunt Rose.

Before I can draw up a plan for this month, though, it would be wise to take an inventory of what I already know. This, I began with yesterday's post, when I reviewed what I had already written about this sister of my paternal grandfather. However, besides checking what I've already written, it would help to review the documents I've found, to see what gaps in Rose's timeline might be begging for more information.

Though Aunt Rose, like her tight-lipped brother who refused to divulge his national origin even to his own children, was not born in the United States, I do know I'd like to focus on what else can be found on Aunt Rose through American resources. Besides rounding out the collection of the usual documents—census records, marriage records, and death certificate—I do want to know more about her day to day life. For this, I have precious few resources, but I know there have to be more out there. This is where online newspaper resources become a potential goldmine—especially those society pages which keep tabs on who was invited to wedding showers and baby showers, or dinners with out-of-town guests or extended family. I want to harvest as many names as I can find from the pages of local newspapers. Even more, I would love to learn what life was like for this aunt I've never met.

Finally, as I was reminded in the last two weeks, I need to revisit my DNA results, not only through Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool, but also using the tools at MyHeritage, which is rich in matches from European countries. According to my ThruLines results for Aunt Rose's Polish maternal grandfather, for instance, I have twenty matches which belong to that line. Examining their trees online might lead to more information—and I won't forget to reach out and connect with those distant cousins, in case anyone might welcome a conversation on our mutual research focus.

We'll make that first step a wrap-up of our document inventory with tomorrow's post, before we launch into an in-depth exploration of Aunt Rose's milieu, the thriving, bustling metropolis of New York City.