A Heritage of Mobility

Photo courtesy Cy Crumley

It’s not a short drive from Florida to Tennessee, and with the price of gas nowadays, it isn’t a cheap trip, either.

That’s today. Can you imagine the limits to travel a hundred years ago? And yet, my relatives didn’t seem to find that to be much of a barrier to relocation.

Remember my great-grandmother, Sarah Ann Broyles McClellan—the one I mentioned a couple days ago? The McClellan homestead was in northern Florida. Though their hometown of Wellborn itself is tiny, and though it’s been many years since the family lived there, their legacy can still be seen in the lake and cemetery that each bear their surname.

But Sarah Ann wasn’t from Wellborn. She wasn’t even from Florida. She was from Tennessee.

And the family’s travels didn’t stop there. Sarah Ann was raised in Tennessee, but her father was from South Carolina, and her mother was from Georgia. And well over 100 years before that, her Broyles forebears braved the trip across the Atlantic from their ancestral home somewhere in Germany.

And I can’t even stomach the cost of a trip across town!

Why Would Someone Want to Do All That?

When we think of hobbies, we think of fun things to do with free time. Genealogy can be a lot of work, granted. But for some strange reason, that doesn’t disqualify it from having a hearty following of enthusiasts.

So who would want to pursue their family history? Many people with many reasons.

Of course, I’ve already mentioned the group I’m in: people who just always have wanted to know. They can’t explain it: it was love at first sight.

New moms and dads form another group. There is just something about thinking of that babe-to-come that turns minds and hearts back to parents, grandparents, and those mysterious others in a long line of those who have gone before. It’s ironic, but the new sparks an interest in the old.

Which points to a corollary of that: grandparents. Something about being a newly-minted grandparent acts like the Blarney Stone of the gift of genealogical gab. Grandparents want to tell their story, and to have it passed down to future generations. They want those precious babies to know about their forebears!

A sadder impetus to research happens to reveal itself in the aftermath of losing a loved one. I’ve had friends and relatives ask me questions about family research a few weeks after a funeral—usually when they start that tedious process of sifting through all the belongings of the dear departed one. Old photos, letters, and diaries prompt memories—and questions. Those left behind are left wondering sometimes—I know my dad’s family was, with the mysteries we are still trying to uncover. It’s always better to ask all those questions before losing our precious links to family heritage, but sometimes it is just not possible.

Another prompt to starting research comes from a more unexpected route: a school assignment in grade school or even high school. That’s what started a cousin of mine down the path of asking questions of older relatives. Some of her teenage discoveries were the only link I had to the mysteries of our family’s arrival as immigrants in 1880s America. While younger students aren’t necessarily equipped with the persistence and patience required of serious researchers, their initial discoveries may whet their appetite for revisiting the hobby in later years. In the meantime, personal family history is a great lens through which to gain perspective on major events in world and national history.

There are probably as many stories of “why I got started” as there are family researchers. But they all go back to that initial kernel: the need—the desire—to know where we came from.

Piecing Together People

Sarah Ann Broyles McClellan

“I remember my grandmother.”

When my mother talked about her grandmother, she often got a far-away look in her face. This was the woman who raised my mother in Florida for a year while her own mother attended to the health problems of a younger daughter—problems that included extended care at Johns Hopkins University’s hospital, a long way away from home.

“Sometimes, she looked so sad—but she had this laugh,” my mother would reminisce. It was a joyful laugh, and my mom loved to hear it. But in my mother’s reflections of this woman, she always left me with the impression that she considered her grandmother an enigma.

There was something so special about the year my mother spent with her grandmother. It must have been a year of angst—after all, why did her own mother leave her? It was time spent with a woman who loved her dearly, was tender and cuddled her when needed, but who was also an astute businesswoman (she owned some orange groves and contracted their produce with some national companies) and busy wife of a professional man.

I suppose my mother would tend to notice this coupling of contrasts. The strands of the tapestry that made up my mother’s own life produced a woman of contradictions I’m still unable to fathom. Since my mother’s passing nearly four years ago, I’ve plumbed the depths of her many journals, trying to piece together the reminiscences and observations she jotted down over the years. It’s times like today—her birthday—that my mind turns to those memories in an attempt to understand who she really was. Sometimes, in glimpsing her memories of others, the many disparate observations of my own mother coalesce.

It was this picture of my great-grandmother that once got my mother talking about those memories. She had this portrait on a shelf near her writing desk so she could look at it often—and remember. For some reason, years ago, she felt prompted to give a copy of it to my daughter. As much as my mother never liked pictures, she had a different feeling about this one. Perhaps it was for the few good memories it evoked.

That wasn’t the only reminiscing my mother would do about her family. The sticky summer evenings of my New York childhood would put her in mind of her own lazy summers at the family homestead in northern Florida. She could remember falling asleep on the porch while her elders droned on about the state of politics and other grown-up affairs.

The McClellan family had farmed near a little town called Wellborn—a speck on the road, halfway between Jacksonville and Tallahassee. That was the place they had called home since at least 1845, when my great-great grandfather William Henry McClellan was born there.

Wellborn was in a county called Suwannee—a fact my musician father had fun reminding me, considering composer Stephen Foster’s tune “Old Folks at Home” immortalized the name (or at least a misshapen replica of it). Mr. Foster never set foot in Florida, and neither have I, but we both can claim a little taste of its ambience.

And through those memories, I can claim a little bit of Florida’s history, too—but that’s a story for another day.

A Brief Historical Tour – How Things Got Started

I’ve toyed with family research for decades, but keeping a collection of hand-scribbled notes of names and vague recollections only works for so long. Then the exponential thing kicks in and you get buried in a snowstorm of bits of paper. I didn’t really kick off my search until I applied some computer power.

I still have some of those papers, but they are now flurry-free, safely boxed up, and will probably never again see the light of day. Take it from me: the most essential thing to do, as soon as possible, is find a way to organize your discoveries that bypasses pen and paper.

My first purchase was a genealogy database program. I chose FamilyTreeMaker. Its developer, Banner Blue, launched the product in 1989. I bought the product only a few years later, but by then, it was up to version 4.40 for Windows 95. Don’t laugh—I still use it. Not that I thoroughly researched all my options and chose wisely. I just found it at Costco, the price was right, and I was ready to buy.

I can’t vouch for FamilyTreeMaker today. I’m really happy with my program, but since then, the Banner Blue Software division was bought out by Broderbund, which was purchased by The Learning Company. And that’s only the ancient history of it all. I have no idea what the program is like after all those changes. All I know is that you really should have some digital way to organize all the stuff you’ll discover when you start searching out your own family history.

At that same time, I got my e-mail and online access through the old Prodigy service. One serendipitous discovery was that Prodigy hosted forums on all sorts of subjects, and several of them were genealogy-related. That’s where I first learned about the benefits of sharing the details of my search. I got such a kick out of meeting a 9th cousin online, from my mother’s Broyles line, through the Prodigy forums. I met numerous fellow enthusiasts who were generous with their time and happy to help a newbie like me. Of course, the inevitable happened, and Prodigy was bought out by a series of other businesses and was never the same. Who knows—they may still be hosting those wonderful forums, but I’m no longer there to see it.

Thankfully, I somehow stumbled upon a free internet-based genealogy resource called RootsWeb. Founded in the mid 1990s by two Ph.D. level researchers, Brian Leverich and Karen Isaacson, RootsWeb called a hideout near the pinnacle of the Grapevine north of Los Angeles home for several years until Ancestry.com graciously assumed the role of host of this nonprofit entity.

RootsWeb was a treasure trove—everybody sharing, coaching, encouraging, and sometimes just plain old gabbing about what we all loved to do best: genealogy. It was a classroom housed in a playground. I still love to connect with people there. My goal this summer is to upload my files to their free WorldConnect project and give back with some sharing of my own.

There are loads more resources, of course, but for today, I promised a short tour of what happened when I first started family tree research. The rest is yet to come.

Looking at my Strands

Because my father’s family had a story that I still haven’t entirely unraveled, some of my earlier research centered on my mother’s family. That was a safe bet. My mother’s father, as far as she knew, had a line that had been in the New World since the 1600s. (I was eventually able to bear her out on this.) She knew, thankfully, her paternal grandmother’s maiden name, so that gave me a start on pushing back the cover on another generation. My mother’s maternal line had a well-documented history in the state of Florida, and they were fiercely proud of their surname. Within this family grouping I now had a cluster of names: Davis, Boothe, McClellan, Broyles.

After my research hiatus during the starving-student years of college and post-college unemployment, I added some new family strands with the occasion of my marriage. These were names centered in the west: Bean, Woodworth, Sowle, Brague.

Life happens, and sometimes that includes widowhood. Happily, the story continues with a more upbeat Part Two: a second marriage added the paternal surnames Stevens, Tully, Kelly, paired with maternal names Flowers, Metzger, Gordon, and Snider. This, additionally, expanded my geographical concentration to include Canada and Ireland.

Those are enough lines to start weaving!

Why a Tapestry?

Take two threads, woven vertically, and cross them skillfully with two threads woven horizontally, and you have the rudiments of a tapestry.

Take two people, joined together as husband and wife, whose child someday meets and marries another now-grown child of two other people, and you have the interweavings of a family tapestry.

Each paired line weaves its way through society, through the culture, through the ages. Each snippet paints a picture, tells a story. In the aggregate, each stitch is only one small part of the overall scene. Each family’s moment in history seems a mere stitch in time. But each pairing produces an effect on the next generation, and each pairing brings with it the heritage of the choices made previously. Each of us has a heritage made up of couplings of unique individuals. We have the opportunity to speak our piece through the warp and woof of our generations.

It is fascinating to consider how people—most of them common people such as I am, and such as the majority of the world is—in the aggregate make a difference based on who they are as individuals in families, to consider how they are interwoven with others to influence the world’s immediate destiny.

I am beholden to the choices made before me. I don’t want to discard them—or worse, ignore them. There is something calling me to “turn the hearts of the children to the fathers.” There is a cry to honor those who made choices to bring me to where I am. There is a benefit to remembering.

Learning one’s heritage is starting with those two strands, moving back in time to see where they intersected with two other threads, then four, then eight, then....

Mother’s Day: An Appropriate Launch for a Family Blog

“I was born this way.”

When it comes to family history, I can’t remember ever not wanting to know. I think it a fair excuse for obsession over genealogy to claim I was born wanting to know.

Though I certainly didn’t get any satisfaction from answers to my first questions, credit me with persistence.

My dad’s first answer: “Aaaah, you don’t wanna know that.”

My mom’s first answer: “....... .”

OK, next attempt: research at library. I think I had been reading for about three years when I checked out my first genealogy book. I had to cross the hall to find it in the adult section. The children’s librarian stuck mainly to fairy tales, and I had already read most of those.

Through most of high school and college, I set the dream on the shelf and tried to study practical things—you know, those things that will get you a real job.

I can remember the awe-inspiring moment when I first learned that I could get a microfilm on loan with—oh, happy day!—census records. Pure bliss.

From that point on, old libraries were my friend. There was nothing to compare with the dusty feel of ancient catalogs, the unmistakable smell of past ages in print. Yet, for years I felt as if I were enjoying the journey without ever attaining the thrill of the catch. Searching for my family name in records was the Irish equivalent of seeking Smith.

...until I learned that my surname was not Irish, after all. Some of my father’s reticence in revealing his roots started to unravel as other relatives began to disclose snippets of long-forgotten memories. Secrets of people long gone still left telltale signs. The chase became more tantalizing.

I fell to temptation and branched out to research other lines when progress on my own father’s line faltered. Though laughable in retrospect, I remember those first interviews with relatives. Most were certain their grandparents were the ones “fresh off the boat.” Most were proven wrong as I moved back through time, generation to generation, still here, sometimes, even in colonial America.

Sometime in the early 1990s, I discovered online resources for genealogy. New vistas opened—and keep beckoning. I’ve now amassed a database of family members far and wide that extends to over 12,000 names. Now that’s a family!

Along the way in this journey, there have been so many who have helped make the connections and further the research, that I want to give back in some sort of way. Oh, I’ve volunteered and helped others, too, but it occurred to me that maybe others in my very-extended family might want a way to check up on my progress on their part of the family. Not just the names and dates—those are so dull and grey. There needs to be a way to share the story of the journey, the ups and downs of the chase, the wonderment of the new discovery.

And to discuss it with others on the same path.

For this reason, I’m starting this blog. Welcome to my journey. Whether it’s yours, too, or not, I’m pleased to have you as a traveling companion.