This is my first-ever diary, so please bear with me. I became interested in my family history more than 35 years ago. My family, at least on my dad’s side, is a little odd because of the generational time span. Most generations are in the range of 20-25 years, mine is 35-40. My dad’s mother was born in 1869, dad was born in 1909 and I appeared in 1940.
Some of dad’s relatives kept certain items: a pulpit bible dating from the early 1820s, a few pieces of china, an elk horn carving set, also dating from the early 1820s. My great grandparents brought them to this country in the late 1830s when they emigrated from Huddersfield, N. Yorkshire to St Louis. I also have several letters written to them from friends in Huddersfield and I also have a number of letters written in the mid-to-late 19th century, including about a dozen of my grandfather’s Civil War letters to his wife. None of the paper products have fared well due to age and not being kept in ideal conditions as well as fading of ink. Fortunately, shortly after I came into position of the letters I transcribed them and now have hard copies.
There are a lot of gaps in the record of that particular family branch but there are some interesting things as well. Two cousins wrote a diary describing their steamboat trip up the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to the Nebraska territory. A brother of my great-grandmother was traveling in a wagon train along the Oregon Trail: he died two days after the letter was written (cause of death not known). Another of great-grandmother’s brothers ended up in Newport, Oregon and become something of a local legend.
Serendipity also has a role in learning about your family. It may, or may not, have anything to do with specific individuals because it can also let you learn something about the times in which they lived. For example, one of the plates my great-grandmother brought with her was, frankly, a very unattractive piece of ironstone – a funny shade of light brown with a dark brown leaf in the center. I am not interested in junk stores but my sister loves to browse in them. One afternoon she dragged me along with her, and while wandering around I was surprised to see an entire display of that same ironstone. Even in quantity, it was still pretty darn ugly. It turns out that this particular ironstone was one the types of dishware used as ballast on sailing ships. Perhaps the plate I have came from the ship bringing the family from Liverpool to New York.
I had never had any interest in England as I wrongly thought it was crowded and dirty. But in 1976 I started my workday as I usually did with a cup of coffee and the opinion page of the now-defunct Houston Post. There was a letter to the editor from a woman making her first visit to Houston expressing her delight with the city and the welcoming natives. Her address was Huddersfield. I wrote her a brief letter and to my surprise heard back from her a few weeks later. She suggested I send her background information (names, addresses if known) and she would pass it on to the local newspaper. I received a number of letters from people who had read the piece in the newspaper, most of them just wanting to say hi.
One letter I received was from an instructor at Leeds Polytechnic; he was also very interested in genealogy and had the same last name (Briggs) as one of my ancestors. We wrote to each other fairly often and in 1980 I decided to go see Huddersfield for myself. I stayed with the lady who wrote the letter to the editor (we had been writing to each other) and her family and I are still close. Anyway, I met the genealogy buff for dinner. (In spite of writing to each other for nearly four years, it was not a pleasant evening. We loathed each other on sight and haven’t written a word to each other since! He did say he ultimately believed we had familial connection somewhere. Whoopee. I don’t know what he thought of me but I found him to be an arrogant and rude prat.) However, he did give me a computer printout of the 1840 census and in it I found the names of the individuals who wrote to my great-grandparents who had settled in St Louis. The census didn’t further my knowledge of the Briggs family but was just another piece of information to fit into the puzzle.
I haven’t yet utilized ancestry.com but plan to do so before too long. All the information I have I’ve input into FamilyTreeMaker. Any searcher of family history will tell you to talk to your family elders. Better year, get them to talk into a recorder. (My sister did this with my dad so not only do we have stories of his life but when we really get to missing him we can listen to his voice. Priceless.