Look, Pa! I Can Read Polish!

As I struggle my way through documents with unpronounceable words, I realized something. After several years of banging my head against the brick wall blocking my paternal grandfather's story, I must have developed a knack for learning Polish by osmosis. Not that I can read Polish, exactly, but I'm starting to get the hang of it.

Take my current struggle with finding documents for the Olejniczak branch of the family. The transcriptions for several family members are at BaSIA, but to see the actual scans of the documents, I need to click through to szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl.

Of course, once I got to that website, I realized the entire thing was written in Polish. Well, what did I expect, right? But somehow, looking at choices like this didn't baffle me for long.

Or how about this one?

Incredibly, I guessed right on both of these. So I've spent my days happily clicking on "link do skanu" to produce URLs like the one above—which, by the way, extends far beyond what is showing in the little white box with the archive's web address—and then clicking on "kopiuj link" to harvest and paste the document's specific address into my family trees, or wherever I want to preserve that address for future reference.

I realized that, repeated often over years, a few words from other languages can sometimes become far less intimidating than they at first seemed. Of course, it helped that about five years ago, it occurred to me to learn how Polish phonics work—especially given their use of diacritical marks—and I created a blog post with links to help me remember for the next time I visited this research challenge. Websites like this one on the Polish alphabet and a companion site guiding me on pronunciation became indispensable cheat sheets for future work. 

Now that I'm deep into Polish research once again, I'm finding more resources to add to my Polish toolkit. For instance, I found this charming article helpful in navigating the very different world of Polish names of months—which also made me realize how so many of the Western European heritages follow the same conventions for names of the months. Not Poland, once again, which makes researching Polish ancestors so very different.

While Polish is a language far more difficult than I think I could ever learn, with a little help, it is possible to gain a working knowledge of the terms we researchers are most likely to encounter in our exploration of birth, marriage, or death records. And given Poland's predominant religious heritage as Catholic, many documents were drawn up in Latin—a more universal language to conquer. Then, too, with their political history as part of the dominion of other nations—producing some records, for instance, in German or Russian—a working knowledge of such other languages may make research progress a bit easier...or harder. But with the advent of computers, a little morphing from the dominant language of many programmers—English—can yield a little creative "Polish-izing" which can be deciphered by even someone like non-Polish me.

Still, knowing all that about researching Polish ancestors leads us to develop toolkits and cheat sheets to tap dance our way through multiple languages and handwriting styles. Perhaps that is the only way we can move forward in researching our Polish roots. But after several years of doing so, it is rather refreshing to realize, hey, we can do this, after all. 

Networking, Connecting and Reaching Out

House historian and professional genealogist Marian Pierre-Louis writes the kind of blog that generates discussion. Her post yesterday in Marian’s Roots and Rambles was no exception. She asked,

What is networking? And is it worth the effort?

Her main focus was in questioning whether networking actually helps genealogists and family historians—either professionals or hobbyists—attain their research goals.

I say it does.

Whether you consider the term “networking” from a traditional perspective or Web 2.0 framework, I’d say that networking does have its place in enhancing the research process. It’s just that the improvement may not be readily quantifiable—it may be downright invisible to those who come by it naturally. It’s hard to measure how something keeps you from lesser results than you might have otherwise had, especially when day-to-day genealogy pursuits are already earmarked with so many results of community efforts. And we can't acknowledge with due gratefulness what we don't perceive as the blessings sent our way through others' contributions.

My Bias: Networking in my Roots

Marian mentioned that, to her, networking was something intuitive—something inherited or absorbed by osmosis from her mom.

I owe my dad that same disclaimer: I got it from him. He was the type of guy who knew everyone—and everyone knew him. He was a musician—but also a teacher and a businessman. He mastered the art of just hanging out. He took the time to get to know people. And people thrive when they are around someone who cares. Our family used to joke that we couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into someone who knew our dad—no matter how far from home we traveled.

One day, I sat down and wrote up everything I had learned about networking by watching my dad—and by realizing all the benefits that our family reaped from his tendency to network. I actually ended up using that list as the basis of a seminar I taught at a conference.

Of course, that was before the era of widespread personal computer usage, but the rudimentary basics remain the same. It’s just the equipment that’s gotten souped up. With no cell phone, no laptop computer, no wifi, no social media, I guess you could say my dad could network with one half of our connectivity tied behind his back.

My Track Record: Being the Recipient of Networking Benefits

Just yesterday, someone emailed me to discuss a photo I had shared in a blog post nearly a year ago. It turns out the photo was a picture of her grandmother in her young adult years. I had posted the photo because a distant relative of my husband had loaned it to me to see if I could make any connections. And not only had I made those connections, but I can now point yesterday’s correspondent to other, closer relatives. While it took several months before that blog post yielded any results, as far as networking goes, I say it was well worth the wait.

Last month, one of my readers (and a blogger in his own right) found a way to obtain an old book that happened to mention some details of my husband’s Chicago family from the late 1800s. After discussing the discovery with me via email, he decided to buy a used copy of the book and mail it to me.

Holding that book in my hands, I can’t tell you how awe-struck I am when I leaf through those pages and see our ancestors’ names woven into the narrative of that story. But I can tell you that, if it weren’t for networking, I would never have received the gift of that book, for I’ve never met this reader. I know him only courtesy of online networking. Another blogger whom I’ve also never met, Far Side of Fifty, connected me with this researcher. Through Far Side’s blog, Forgotten Old Photos, I had been trying to learn how to delve into the historic details of old photographs—observing her posts religiously and commenting and asking questions. Somehow, that prompted her to connect me with this other researcher. It was a moment of networking that didn’t cost anyone much of anything—but I’m glad it happened.

I could go on and on about networking serendipity—the very fact that I now know which surname to research for my father’s elusive paternal line is owing to an unexpected tip from someone in the old FamilyTreeMaker users’ network—but I’m sure you have as many stories as I have.

I think we can hypothesize about whether networking is worth all the fuss for endless hours. But until we not only give it a try, but put some effort into making it a part of our life, we can’t do justice to the concept by our speculation. We really need to take networking out for a test drive, read the operating manual and get ourselves educated about this machine we’re about to co-opt. We need to get a rubber-meets-the-road feel for this networking operation and how it connects like-minded people and enables them to collectively achieve their goals.

The Rub: Meeting the Digital Road

When you take that ageless ability to branch out and meet others—to take the initiative to strike up a conversation and see where it leads—and fuse it with the technology we have at our fingertips today, networking has the potential to exponentially grow those traditional results. While the old one-on-one path of “getting to know you” established trust through doing face-to-face time, the newer path absolutely demands integrity in networking—yet opens the doors for the shy as well as the charismatic to participate. While the old route seemed to favor that “good ol’ boy” network, the newer way levels the playing field to facilitate meetings that might not, with the staunch gatekeepers of bygone eras, have ever occurred. The Internet Highway hasn’t really changed the rules; it has just changed the magnitude of possibilities.

And this way isn’t just “All About Me.” I see it as technology’s way of facilitating a new form of the Golden Rule. We can’t just think of networking in terms of what it can do for me. We need to be willing to give before we can expect to get. To realize that thinking about you is good business for me.

Looking for Help in So Many More Places

Genealogists and family history researchers have always pursued an impossible dream: there is always one more ancestor to find, yet one more reference volume to consult, just one more database to check. Even if we could achieve that “one more” dream, it would be impossible to attain it alone. We have to face the fact that research is really a team effort.

With the explosion of genealogical resources both online and off, there is no possible way one person could read it all, record it all, and share it all.

Without a network.

And really—isn’t it true that everything we have already found came with the help of others?

Think of those neophyte years, just learning the ropes of researching, benefiting from the experience—and sometimes the actual data—of other, more seasoned, researchers.

Think of all those queries written to far-flung genealogy societies, hoping that someone in the Perry County Genealogical Society’s newsletter—or the Harper County GenWeb, or the Pottawatomie County Rootsweb mailing list—could answer my brick-wall question.

Think of that quick and easy post on GenForum or Ancestry’s message boards, asking for a local member to do one of those Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness and perform a lookup.

Think of tweeting a latest genealogy find—“Got my DNA results back today!!!”—and adding the hashtag so everyone in the Twitterverse well-versed in #genealogy could share your moment.

And then think how easy technology has made it for us to not only stand there with our electronic hand out, waiting for someone to “gimme”—but also be able to turn around and retweet, Facebook “Like” or Google+ someone else’s insight or notable accomplishment. Every hyperlink you find in any blog post is a writer's way of sharing—read: networking—a new resource with you. The Internet was made for networking. It is a vehicle for collaboration.

Coming to a Place of Gratefulness

When I think of all those possibilities—of giving as well as e-getting—I realize what a powerful position we now find ourselves in as genealogy researchers. We can retweet, along with @marianpl, Ancestry.com’s jubilation that the 1940 census is now fully indexed—a feat, itself, that could never have happened with such speed without the connectivity of the internet and the social proofing of all those validating online friends. We networked to gather such a group of volunteers and get them on a roll. It was a matter of friends passing the word along to friends to the “sixth degree of separation” and beyond.

To merely wonder whether networking is worth someone’s time and effort is rather short-sighted in view of the powerful benefits cascading down on us as we reach out and research. Without the equipment and technology afforded us through the interconnectivity of Web 2.0 systems—the social media we’ve come to take for granted (as if we couldn’t remember a day before cell phones)—and without those rudimentary skills of reaching out and getting to know the person next to us (whether physically or by special interest categories), we could never have accomplished all that we have achieved in our genealogy research. Whether you consider this collectively (as in the 1940 indexing project) or individually (as in each researcher’s willingness to post her family tree in an online format), we have an awesome opportunity to accelerate our genealogical accomplishments by using the resources at hand that allow us to connect with others keen on pursuing those unique-yet-shared interests.

I’d say that kind of networking goes far beyond the realm of “Is it worth the effort?” To me, it’s a matter of “How could I not take advantage of the benefits.”


Photograph, above right: Agnes Dockery O'Brien, born about 1873 in Wisconsin; from the private collection of the descendants of Edna Tully McCaughey.

For the original blog post, see:  Marian's Roots and Rambles: What is networking? And is it worth the effort?

Making the Most of a Last Minute Opportunity

Lately, there have been a lot of genealogy-related posts on preparing for research trips. With coveted archive collections housed in destinations like Salt Lake City and Fort Wayne, the overwhelming resources concentrated in such facilities nearly compel a visitor to be well-prepared. After all the time and expense involved in traveling to such destinations, that’s the only way to make it a cost-effective visit.

But what if, while on the way to some other destination for some other reason, you realize that with a little tinkering of the itinerary, you can jigger next week’s road trip to include a stop at your favorite genealogical dream destination?

That was the situation I found myself in, as our family flew back east to Chicago and then planned a drive to Ohio. At each wifi-enabled coffee stop along the route, as I tapped into my Google Reader, I ruefully noted such posts as Marian Pierre-Louis’ August 2 entry, “Planning a Research Trip.” And all her posts leading up to that point, starting with the one published the day after we left Fort Wayne: “When to Start a Research Plan.”

What’s a last-minute procrastinator to do?

By taking the state highways instead of the interstate freeways, I had realized I could re-route our family through Fort Wayne instead of Indianapolis, and shave seven minutes off the total drive time, to boot. Add a hotel stay in the middle of the journey, and voilà! An instant six hour chunk carved out of our travel plans. Right next to this fabulous genealogy library.

Who could resist?

So, now that the deed is done—despite the well-thought-out advice of the experts—here’s what I can do to salvage a list of “What To Do When a Fabulous Research Opportunity Falls Into Your Lap Even if You Weren’t Prepared To Go.”

Step #1: For crying out loud, who cares if you were prepared or not?! Just GO!

Don’t even think about being prudent or polishing your fallen halo with a false-modesty comment like, “I wouldn’t even dream of going there until I deserved to go by virtue of my impeccable preparation skills.”

Step #2: Do everything you can do to prepare.

Cut to the chase. Eyeball the time you have left before your departure time and figure out how much data you can assemble for your trip. Even though your prep time is short, if you already have records in a genealogy database, you can use that program’s print-out options to generate lists of the specific ancestors you want to zero in on. Better yet, if you already have your data in a web-based system, and can tap into that via your laptop and the internet, do so. Our three-person family research team came to Fort Wayne armed with two laptops and an iPad. Research tables embedded with electrical outlets to spare those batteries, plus wifi access made our limited time at Fort Wayne as productive as possible, by allowing us to check our Ancestry.com and Rootsweb.com family records if we ran into questions that my thumbnail-sketch print-outs didn’t address.

Step #3: Orient yourself to your destination library before arriving there.

While our family had done research in the Allen County Public Library before, I realized it had been at least ten years—and a construction project—since we had last been there. Things had surely changed. Reviewing their website revealed an Orientation Video, as well as online catalog access. There is even a “How To Get Started” link for people just beginning their family history research. It was quite unnerving (but in a serendipitous way)—having watched the Orientation Video at the hotel just before heading to the library that Thursday night—to walk into the genealogy section and see, seated at the librarian’s desk, the very person I had just seen a few minutes before on the video. Right then, I went from “oriented” to déjà vu!

Step #4: As much as possible, utilize online resources before arriving.

This was the part of the trip that my unforgiving time squeeze didn’t permit. For those with the luxury of more time to prepare, the Fort Wayne genealogy collection also includes a sizeable portion accessible online, as well as a catalog of their holdings that can be perused from home.

All in all, if I had it to do over again, I certainly would not have put myself in that time-squeeze position. I would have loved to have more time to prepare.

On the other hand, if I demanded more time up front, I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to stop by at all.

Sometimes it all comes down to that cold cost-benefit analysis: take the opportunity when it presents itself? Or hope for another, more well-prepared chance in the future?

I’ll take mine now.

Above right: 1795 map of Fort Wayne prepared for General Anthony Wayne by P. M. Neff; pen and ink mounted on cloth backing. Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikipedia. In the public domain.

The Grandmother of Genealogy Portals

“Free” is everybody’s favorite word. When it comes to online research, however, “free” may come with caveats. One of them is: you have to find it yourself.

If you know about Cyndi’s List, though, you have found a friend in the search. Since 1996, Cyndi Howells has been aggregating links to the virtually hundreds of thousands of websites and online resources featuring aspects of genealogy large and small. Cyndi, online, is a good person to know.

Cyndi’s List began, literally, as a list. A one-page photocopy of everything genealogically useful that she had found on the web, it was a hand-out she had brought to a meeting of her local Genealogical Society. That was in September, 1995. By the time six months had passed, she had taught herself HTML and built a personal web site to share her by-now thousand-plus links. Since then, it has mushroomed as the idea caught on and people everywhere began sending her suggestions to more links.

The idea seems larger than life: the virtual Big Box of Genealogy Sites. Looking through the categories can seem overwhelming, especially for the new researcher. A recent reorganization of the website helps, but still reminds you that you are on to something BIG.

The huge list of categories—think Wish List for Santa’s Toy Shoppe—was best reassembled into pages of subcategories. A look at the original version, an alphabetical splat of everything there is to know about everything genealogical, gives you an idea of the immenseness of what is Out There. And these are just the categories. Each topic produces a sizeable list of its own at the bidding of your mere click of the mouse.

Sub-category lists help. If you already know what you are looking for, a clickable alphabet at the bottom of the home page streamlines the process of getting in the door. There is a page of “How To” categories. For newbies, there is a separate page of “How To” categories specific to beginner research issues.  If you want to know more about the process behind all the content, there are pages of categories about FAQ topics. And there is even a page about who this mysterious online Cyndi really is.

There are enough categories to fuel over 650 pages of lists of clickable genealogy sites. Want to research your family history in Slovakia? It’s there. Wondering if there is royal blood in your family line? Check here. There is even an entry for Antarctica, in case your forebears headed that far south for the winter. And, not to leave any research possibility untouched, the List also has a category for Outer Space. Pretty thorough.

Cyndi’s List—and its creator—has been featured in Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, USA Today, Parade, Wired, The New York Times, and numerous other publications over the years. Cyndi’s List has a page on Facebook. She also maintains a blog. Don't forget Cyndi's List: the book. And yes, there is even an entry for her website on Wikipedia.

Cyndi’s List is a genealogy playground big enough to need its own map. Don’t let the immense size scare you away, though. There’s plenty of room to roam. Come on down and take a look around.

Howdy. And welcome to the Texas of genealogy research.

Can’t Beat Free and Online

Sometimes the presumption is that hobbies cost money—lots of money. However, despite spending a small chunk for the program I use to organize my genealogy database, I’ve been able to find several online resources that cost me absolutely nothing to use.

There are pockets of shared material scattered all over the internet. The trick is finding where these gems are salted away. One approach is to Google your target names. Another is to use those trusty forums and ask, “Where would I find this?” A third way is to go to the giants that everyone knows and respects and see how much information can be found there—a sort of one-stop genealogical shopping trip, virtual big-box version.

Google is ubiquitous in the online world. I see no reason to ignore its finding power when doing family research. If I have a name I want to research—provided it isn’t too common—I plug it into Google’s little box to see what comes up, putting quote marks around the full name. Since we’re now also immersed in a world that includes social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, sometimes that research strategy gets flooded with too many current-day hits, so I’ve had to modify my approach and add a second search term, like “obituary” or “genealogy” to hone in on what I’m looking for. While that approach doesn’t always get me great results, it sometimes leads me to sites I hadn’t previously been aware of.

As far as the forums go, I can’t say enough positive things about those resources. Many of these sites are peopled with patient and experienced peers—people just like us who love doing family research and are happy to share what they’ve learned along the way. Even if I’m posting a query hoping for Some Kind Soul to volunteer to help me, I inevitably find someone who subscribes to the “teach a man to fish” theory and gives me a short lesson in where I can find more about the answer I’m seeking, rather than give me the handout that only “feeds” me for a day’s worth of genealogical “meals.” I’ve learned about so many free online resources that way. I’m always sure to mark those new-found sites in a genealogy folder in my Favorites file for future reference.

While it is handy to learn about the best place to find obituaries posted in Saskatoon or Regina, or marriage records posted in New Lexington, you can’t beat finding all your research answers in one convenient location. That’s why the many changes to the FamilySearch site have been so exciting. From a streamlined entry screen, you may be able to access everything from census records to actual copies of key documents for several family members. And to think that, only a few years ago, this website featured little more than the transcribed records of the 1880 US Census!

Coupled with this website is a beta version that was used in developing what is available at FamilySearch today. That site has been a bonanza of scanned documents for many of my 19^th century relatives, particularly those resident in the Midwest.

As with many of the resources that can be found online, the aging process becomes an enhancement process: the more these sites are able to augment their holdings, the more that means success in your search ventures.

But why wait? Try entering some of your ancestors’ names in these sites now and take a look at what comes up. You may find—as I did one recent afternoon—that it is hard to pull yourself away from all the material you are uncovering with just the click of your mouse.

Cousins I Never Knew I Had

For the relative-deprived, there is nothing like finding a new cousin. Truth be told, that was one of my hopes when I started family research. Besides one sister, the only relatives I had of my own age when I was growing up were mostly a few cousins-once-removed—which is a concept rather difficult for an eight-year-old to wrap her head around during a summer weekend at the lake.

Somehow, I took that prejudice with me into adulthood, and into my adult endeavors in genealogy. I had read somewhere that, if you are willing to post your family tree on your website, relatives you never knew you had will flock to you. I, however, had no appetite for getting into the technical side of the internet and no intention of developing my own website, so I was out of luck there.

Plodding along at my own research, though, I stumbled upon a way to still be found by those unknown relatives. The answer came, courtesy of those genealogy forums I so appreciate.

When I’m stuck on a research problem, I post queries—those short S-O-S posts for genealogical “HELP!”—on two sites: GenForum, a site now hosted by Genealogy.com, and the Rootsweb subscriber lists. (Now that I’m an Ancestry.com member, I also use the message boards provided by Ancestry and merged with the material freely accessible through Rootsweb.)

What I didn’t realize—well, my head knew it, but somehow it didn’t drop to the heart of my operating system—was that those posts are archived and searchable for years to come.

One day, someone from the Gramlewicz branch of my father’s family sent me an email. Though my Gramlewicz relatives were in America in the early 1900s, this one particular branch had decided to return to Poland, and this person was a descendant of that line. Though she was born in Poland and spoke the Polish language, as a student she had decided to learn English. One day—and this whim hits a surprising number of people—she got to wondering about her family’s origins and Googled her surname to see if she could find anything online.

All those pockets of queries on different surnames and geographic locations that I had posted hither and yon over the years, still aggregated in online archives, found their way to this Polish descendant. Hoping that she could make a connection, she found my email address in the archives and contacted me.

How fun it was to go through the checking process to verify that we were, indeed, talking about the same ancestors! And how wonderful to hear the other side of the story from her perspective.

Of course, the hits are not always right on target. I’ve gotten a number of emails over the years from hopeful researchers desperate to fit my square peg in their round hole. Sometimes the wish is so great to make the fit work! But even the lessons learned from mistakes can be valuable.

I think the farthest-removed relative I’ve met online was a ninth cousin—talk about wrapping your mind around the “once removed” concept!—and this woman from Poland is a third cousin once removed. Besides requiring me to get my relationship lingo down pat, it’s been great fun making connections with relatives I never knew I had.

Take Another Look

With each successive addition of yet another genealogy toy on the internet, The Search becomes easier. However, “easier” sometimes makes me forget how things used to be.

A while back, I was talking with our Chicago aunt about looking into her own family line. This aunt and I are “outlaws,” but that doesn’t keep me from wanting to research her line. I love doing the research, and her line presents me with a challenge.

I didn’t think, at first, that it would be a challenge. While she was one of those people I mentioned before who was raised by someone other than her own biological parents, she still knew the names of both those absent family members. What’s more, the names were not very common, a plus for what I thought might be an easy search.

Wrong. Those names were uncommon enough to yield me zero results.

I had set the project on the back burner and worked on other things—many other things—over the last several years since that conversation.

But a thought tickling the back of my mind got me cooking on that project once again last week.

The thought: my new genealogy toys may prove to be better resources. And they were. Pulling up those old names, I ran them through search engines at my latest playground: Ancestry.com.

While searching on Ancestry can sometimes be a frustrating process—it seems overly cumbersome at some times and outright dense at others—this time, things worked wonderfully. I found a few items on census records. Better yet, Ancestry’s matching program allowed me to find someone else researching basically the same family and share that data.

I took the hints I found on that other family tree at Ancestry and looked further. Switching tracks, I went to a beta site done by the group behind the familysearch.org website. The virtue of this site is ease in searching plus access to scanned documents. From this one site, I was able to copy birth and marriage certificates for a number of people in that family.

Cutting and editing the documents to zero in on the specific family members of interest, I saved them as JPEGs and attached them to an email, sending them to our Chicago family for verification.

And presto! The electronic response provided instant confirmation. While some people prefer the “hunt” of hide-and-seek, in my opinion, toys that make connections like that are so worth a place in my genealogy playground. In my game, I appreciate finding answers.

Giving Back

I don’t suppose it would be possible to pursue genealogy research without the help of others. Many others.

This is one hobby where you just cannot be afraid to ask questions. The good news is: there are many other hobbyists out there who are happy to provide answers.

They have learned the art of giving back.

When I started researching my husband’s Stevens and Tully roots in Chicago, I was a total stranger to the city. The “many hands make light work” philosophy picked up and carried me where my lack of familiarity had left me. I was introduced to all sorts of resources by the many knowledgeable peers at Cook County forums hosted by Rootsweb and GenForum.

It was the same way when I journeyed to New York City in my research.

I learned where the pockets of helpful people were: the Brooklyn Rootsweb site had saints who were patient with newbies, while some other New York sites seemed stocked with elitists eager to snub anyone not yet delving into the 1600s in their research.

I discovered volunteers willing to look up obituaries for me in obscure corners of North Dakota or Manitoba. I found shutterbugs happy to snap a requested photo of a grave site. I got an education in Random Acts Of Genealogical Kindness.

Volunteers were all over the place. Some indexed and organized. Some photocopied. Some got technical and developed websites.

And I got to sit back in my easy chair and surf for information in the comfort of a place free of dust and broken microfilm-reading machines.

There is something about those Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, though. One good turn seemed to beg for another. And, considering the richness of my growing family tree database, I had certainly reaped well what others had sown.

It got me to thinking. If I don’t pass on the good that’s benefited me, who will get to reap these blessings in the future? I realized I’m a link in a chain.

And so I became part of the many hands that are lightening the work for others. It’s so easy: volunteer any knowledge you have on a forum. Give back by doing a lookup in your area. Share your family history data online. Support a Historical Society in one of the towns where your ancestors lived.

Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness can be simple, one-time gestures. They don’t need to be burdensome time commitments. They can just be something you do on your next trip to the library. Just look up your own state or province and county in one of the forums and see if anyone has posted a request for help. Be the eyes and ears in your town for one day for a fellow researcher from miles away. The benefits we reap from our mutual endeavors are only as good as each of our efforts make them.

Trying for the End Run

There are times when genealogists can go no farther. They have tracked the family tree from child to parent, then to that parent’s parents, but now they’ve hit a snag. It may be an irregularity in records. It may be a lack of records. Whatever it is, genealogy hobbyists often call that end-of-the-line person their “brick wall.”

It didn’t take me long, in researching my own father’s family line, to run into that brick wall. I pretty much hit it on step two: my father’s father. Oh, I had documentation from his death certificate to show the names of his parents. But that information was scant—and there seemed to be something just not right about it, either.

A cousin told me our grandfather had said he was adopted. What a discouraging thought: I envisioned court-sealed records and a fate of never being able to know. (At that time, I had no idea that adoption wasn’t necessarily the strictly legal process it is nowadays.)

There had to be some way around this roadblock. That’s where I tried using what I call an end run. If I got nowhere researching directly back from my target person (my paternal grandfather), I would find a parallel track and push back from there.

My only clue was an old picture of a stylish lady wearing the most pretentious hat I’d ever laid eyes on. With her in this picture was my father as a boy, in the firm supervisorial grip of his mother, along with his little sister. All I knew about that lady was that she was called “Aunt Rose.”

This is where that old cassette tape from my brother comes in. Remember how I had pored over the material in that tape? As my aunt had been reminiscing—over seventy years since the picture with Aunt Rose was taken—she started to mention her aunt’s last name. It was Miller. Or...was it...??? My aunt couldn’t remember—after all, she was nearing eighty at the time. Evidently, her Aunt Rose had been married twice.

Well, it was a clue. Coupled with the squishy data from my grandfather’s death certificate, which showed his mother’s maiden name to be Krauss, I set out to explore a parallel track.

I did turn up a few leads from that attempt, although I’m still working on that line. The technique, though, encouraged me to try that again when I hit other brick walls. I used it to connect some other surnames—Gramlewicz and Aktabowski—to my grandmother Sophie’s line. And more recently as well as more successfully, I used it to research cousins of my husband’s Tully and Ryan connection in Canada, which yielded enough pay dirt to uncover John Tully’s parents’ names and build a bridge to a possible point of origin in Ireland.

Many people are only focused on finding—literally—their forebears. But I’ve learned it is worthwhile to keep in mind that cousins, aunts, and other offshoots from the direct line can provide valuable material when you are halted to a dead stop when tackling the proverbial brick wall ancestor.

Pass It On

When my daughter was young, I wanted to instill in her a love of beauty. Purchasing quality books was one way to do that. I bought books with uplifting messages. Stories coupled with beautiful artwork doubled the impact.

I wanted to pass along my loves to her, and genealogy was no exception—not because I wanted her to recite dull, cold statistics of names and dates, but because I wanted her to love the important people in my life even though they were no longer here for her to know.

That love of those who have gone on before us is a tender sentiment, yet one so ephemeral. Captured, it holds the value of the individual highly, true, but it seeks also to honor and appreciate. Relinquished by just one generation, it may be forever lost. We may only instill that value in our children if we hold it, ourselves.

It was a wonderful discovery to find a book that coupled my goal of instilling beauty and my desire to foster appreciation for those in past generations. Actually, it was more than a great discovery: this book made me cry. I could hardly read it aloud without a catch in my voice at the end.

The endearing story traces the life of a young girl, Jessie, suddenly finding herself sent, alone, from her native eastern European homeland to the shores of America. While reading the book, I couldn’t help but wonder what made my own Polish ancestors leave their home, or how similar their experience might have been to the Jessie’s.

It may be hard to find When Jessie Came Across the Sea now. After all, it was published in 1997. If you are fortunate to run across a copy, snatch it up now! And be sure to read it aloud to your younger children or your grandchildren. If you are a homeschooling parent, or if you like to provide educational enrichment for your family, there are online curriculum suggestions to broaden and personalize students’ experience of the story.

Using a book like Amy Hest’s artful tale invites young people to take an interest in the necessary task of preserving family history. It will do us no good to do all the work of recording our research finds if they lay forgotten and uncared for when we are no longer able to pursue those labors. After we have done all we can to pass it on, someone else will need to pick up the baton.

Genealogy sometimes seems to be the exclusive domain of grandmothers and other white-haired people. Not so. Anyone with a moderate level of curiosity is bound to wonder about their roots at some point. Encourage that natural interest in your children or your students. Find a way to pass it on.

Remembering Via Social Networking

Before you know it, it will be Father’s Day. The third Sunday in June in many countries, the day is set aside to celebrate fatherhood.

There is, of course, the commercial aspect to the holiday, as people scurry to buy the Man Who Has Everything yet one trinket more.

However, on a brighter note—at least in the cloying world of social networking—there is a trend to add the intangible of honor to the day’s festivities.

I saw the idea spread this year on Mother’s Day. People started posting their old pictures on Facebook. Mostly, it was photos of friends’ childhood, remembering their parents in younger years. But then I saw it myself: people included grandparents and prior generations, if they had the pictures.

When we see a person, our individualistic culture makes it easy to presume that what we see is the full sum of his or her own being. But that’s not true. We are made up of the many people who have filled our lives from start to current point. And the most significant of these are often our relatives.

In 2009, I put together a photo album on Facebook of my dad’s old photos. One of the reasons I posted that was just to share who he was with my friends—the people who will never get to meet him. I should have known that my family members who are Facebook friends would also see the pictures—and then pass them along to all their relatives in a greater circle of extended family. It was fun hearing from family members I actually haven’t yet met, or only knew as babies from so many years ago.

Come to think of it, for those who include their relatives in their circle on social networking sites, there are probably other ways to share family memorabilia, too. The infrastructure is there, waiting to be exploited. Facebook already has several group sites organized around genealogy themes. I easily found one Gordon Family site. Poking around to find more examples, I ran across one for Relatives of Walter Laskowski; being that I have a distant cousin by that name, it immediately caught my eye, but unfortunately turned out to be for someone not related. But the idea is there for ways to work collectively on family research. Many hands do make light work—and in this case, would probably add some fun to the mix.

Utilize whatever internet resource is at your fingertips. These are tools for converting intangible memories into tangible formats. It’s all about passing it along, and honoring those we remember while we do so.

Spanning Generations

It’s the season for the traditional end-of-school-year festivities that make some students squirm and others shine. As in most other endeavors, our family took the alternate route for childhood education and homeschooled. One of our year-end tasks was to participate in the Project Fair organized by our parents’ co-op.

One year, while our daughter displayed her projects on photography, graphic arts and other parentally-imposed assignments, my husband and I strolled the aisles looking at other students’ work.

One young man had a display about his great-grandfather’s service in World War II. My husband, always interested in WWII memorabilia, paused to admire the student’s collection. While he looked over the letters and photos the boy had displayed, all of a sudden a great disconnect flashed in my mind: here was my husband, great-grandson of someone who served in the Civil War, talking to a boy whose great-grandfather lived through World War II.

It’s all a matter of generations.

Take a family with lots of children, let the youngest be a parent of the next generation’s large family. If the baby of that household becomes your parent, and you are the youngest of that home, a trip backwards through the generations can take leaps and bounds through the decades. On the other hand, if the oldest child of a family gives birth at the age of twenty to the first grandbaby, and that scenario is repeated through a few generations, it is not that difficult to fill your photo album with five-generation family portraits.

The passing of time has certainly changed the look of family composition. A quick look at census records from a hundred years ago can easily demonstrate that.

That was one aspect of family research that I hadn’t noticed when I first started digging up my roots. Of course, that was in the age of microfilm-at-archives drudgery. The dust, uncooperative readers, and poor film quality distracting eyes and nose were enough to draw attention from the real point of being there.

Now, there are all sorts of online resources—and some of them are deliciously free. Ahhh! Just breathe in the wonderful scent of home, relax in the comfort of your own easy chair...and you can actually read between the lines on those census pages.

You can even do a test drive for yourself. If you know the name of a grandfather or grandmother, enter it here. If you are part of one of those families whose generations each had more than two children and thus spanned more than a decade at a leap, your grandparents’ names may actually be listed in a publicly-available pre-1940 census.

How strangely enticing to see your own grandparents’ names in a document that old! Though it only shows the slightest glimpse of who those people were—where they lived at the moment, maybe how old they were when they were first married, what language their parents spoke—it is a snapshot that beckons you to step inside the picture and imagine more about who those people really were.

Finding It In The Forum

Some jobs are just too messy for the Lone Ranger. Some jobs require the hunting and pecking of a collective effort—the hundreds of hands and eyes from which minute details cannot escape.

Forums have always been gathering places. Whether the ancient setting of Rome, for whom the term “forum” actually meant “marketplace,” or the town squares of colonial America, these were public places set right in the middle of everything. People came to buy and sell, debate political issues, socialize and gossip. In the online world of genealogy, forums are much the same, though in this case, divided into categories where conversations center on specific topics.

Today, I’d like to take you on a brief tour of the forums which have made research a lot easier for me. Hopefully, you’ll see some sites that pique your interest and bolster your confidence that you can do family history research, too.

One of the first places I started my research was at Rootsweb. As I explained in an earlier post, Rootsweb was a non-profit group founded on the vision of providing people a way to access and share data via the internet.

Rootsweb developed an archived, subscription-based system of mailing lists, divided both by geographical area and surname. Though the hosting is now provided through Ancestry.com, the original search page can still be accessed here.

One thing about the Rootsweb lists was that you needed to subscribe—but that was no object, as the subscriptions were free. Once on the list, any time someone posted to that list, you received a copy of the e-mail, either singularly or in digest mode. I started out subscribing to some of my target surnames—for instance, Tully—but soon realized the cumbersomeness of reading every post of every person in the world seeking information on the Tully family. I then switched research strategies and zeroed in on specific counties where I knew family had settled. For my Tully family, it was the Chicago area. For my Flowers and Metzger in-laws, it was Perry County, Ohio.

Whether subscribed or not, anyone could search the archive of any particular list, either by browsing or by entering keywords. I played around with that, searching for the proverbial distant cousin who might also be researching the same families.

Since I had purchased the database management system, FamilyTreeMaker, I also accessed the forum services linked to their company: GenForum. Laid out in a similar manner to Rootsweb, this site gave me an alternate location to post queries when I was stuck on a particular research problem.

I’ve already mentioned how much things change in the corporate world and how it impacts the products we use, and using these lists was no different. Rootsweb entered into a hosting agreement with Ancestry.com, which required Ancestry to develop a plan to provide Rootsweb’s mailing lists while also continuing to feature their own message board system. Anyone can post now on Ancestry’s message board system through Rootsweb, with a “gateway” to having that note simultaneously posted on the corresponding Rootsweb mailing list, even if the writer didn’t hold a current subscription to the list. About the same time, the GenForum site became part of Genealogy.com, increasing the search capabilities there.

I learned a lot as a subscriber to the original Rootsweb lists for Brooklyn, New York, and Chicago, Illinois. From time to time, depending on where I was “going” in my research, I’d also subscribe to various United States county lists, unsubscribing when I no longer needed the help or could no longer offer my own input. I’m still on the Perry County, Ohio, list, and have run into several of my husband’s distant relatives there. After all this research, I think I know more about his extended family than he does!

Each step of the way was part of an easy, incremental learning curve. For every newbie question I posted, there was usually some kind soul who was willing to help me learn about a new resource or technique for furthering my own research. I’ve learned stuff as widely varied as the few Polish words I picked up while working on my father’s ancestry, to the source of dot-matrix era “ftp” files of death records for my maternal grandfather’s family in the hills of eastern Tennessee.

Getting started is as easy as locating the surname or geographical location of the specific ancestor you want to research. Get on the site, take a look around (“lurk”) until you get a feel for what is happening there, then introduce yourself and ask a research question. Just reading what others have posted is a great start to your own learning curve. And who knows—you may meet a distant cousin in the process!

Paper Chase

It hasn’t been hard for me to delve into old records. Even before I did genealogy in earnest, I loved walking through old church cemeteries. One of my favorite day trips, when I lived on Long Island, was to drive to Sag Harbor and wander through their graveyards. I’d search for the oldest headstone. Sometimes, I’d spy the epitath of a Portuguese sailor born in the 1600s.

Getting started researching your family history requires a little record-keeping, too. And a little sleuthing. But you don’t necessarily need to get as hands-on as a walk through the cemetery.

Looking into old records, however, does bring you into another world. Some people are comfortable with that; others can’t shake themselves of the air of morbidity it entails.

Looking at your family tree is like taking a trip through history—only going backwards. You start with what you know: you, and your parents. You already know your own name, and unless you were legally adopted, you know the name of at least one parent, if not both.

While it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to point this out to you, that slip of paper—your official birth record—serves as your first document to identify which parents you are linked with. Saving that, and a long line of other such documents, may one day verify your status as a “First Family” of the state where your family settled. (I’ll post more about that another day.)

Armed with your parents’ names and their dates of birth, the quest is on to find their birth certificates to document their parents’ names. The search may be as easy as a phone call to mom or dad. Or contact with the office of Vital Records or the Health Department that keeps such documents in the state where your parents were born. Names there will link you with the next generation—your grandparents.

This is where the search turns morbid. Like the walk through the cemetery I mentioned above, another place to learn about your ancestors’ significant identifying dates is in death records. Keep in mind you may find some discrepancies in information—official people complete the birth certificate during a happy time, but gather the information to fill in the blanks on death certificates from people who are under a great deal of stress. Memories sometimes fail under such circumstances, so it is always wise to verify those records with a second document.

A less official corollary to the death certificate is the obituary. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are a few online resources to access newspaper archives with this information.

Once you have worked your way backwards enough in time to cross the access barrier of 1930 (soon to be 1940), you have bridged the screen set up by census regulations to protect the privacy of those who are still living. You can now begin working with census records.

If you’ve worked your daisy-chain of names diligently through the generations (or just asked your living relatives), you should have the names of family members alive in 1930 and can figure out their approximate ages. Having an idea of what state they might have lived in helps, too. If you are serious about your search and can invest in any of the current genealogy subscription websites that offer digitalized, searchable census records, it will not take long to continue the trail backwards, taking ten years at a leap!

If you are not prepared to spring for the approximately $20 per month cost of such sites, you can still continue your research. You can pursue your roots the way I did pre-PC: many public libraries have a lending service in which you can order specific microfilm copies of the census, and search by hand, cranking it out on a reader, county by county and district by district.

But wait! You may be in luck! Many of those same libraries also have computer subscriptions for their patrons, and you may be able to use those thoroughly-modern services after all.

And if not, you still have options, one of which is the network of Family History Centers. Though originated, staffed and maintained by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, most of the Centers designate a time when their genealogy holdings may be accessed by the general public, regardless of church affiliation. If there is no Family History Center near you, their website allows you to tap into not only census records online but a host of other documents as well.

These documents, assembled, provide a rough sketch of your family history—a history you are just beginning to glimpse, piece by piece, as you step backward in time.  

May is for Memories

Springtime: a time for growth, fresh ideas and projects. Springtime in the air energizes and encourages. It makes us look forward to the new.

The May calendar doesn’t bear that out, though. Mother’s Day, a time designated to honor each one’s mother, leaves many remembering a woman long gone. Following on the heels of that is our country’s designation of Peace Officers Memorial Day, and National Police Week—a time to remember those whose service heroically ended in the ultimate sacrifice. And the month ends in our Memorial Day weekend, once again commemorating the selfless service of others, this time to country.

Ironically, two of these three designated dates got their impetus from the aftermath of the Civil War, a struggle none of us here today ever lived through.

Our commemorations serve to recall people whose sacrifices told the story of what was important to them.

In addition to the ceremonies we publicly participate in, we can remember those in our own heritage who have served in these capacities, be they Civil War soldiers, veterans of more recent conflicts, law enforcement officers, or each one of our mothers, grandmothers, and family pioneer women.

There are so many tools to help find records of relatives’ service. A basic, free readout of many online sources for this is called Cyndi’s List. There are several other online lists for veterans of war. Another database accesses information on slain law enforcement officers from 1791 to the present, though there are many other sites, often listed by state, that are on the internet.

Of course, that’s for names that your family already knows. If you are just starting your research, keep these links handy. Chipping away at that mysterious unknown chunk of your family history may soon reveal stories you hadn’t heard before. Those are stories that need to take their place in your family’s May remembrances, too.