Genealogy is perhaps my number one hobby. I have always had a love of history and these two things coincide with each other nicely.
Many years ago one of my brothers children had a school assignment to do some genealogy research. This triggered my brother and me to dive into researching our family which we did with gusto for many years (to the interest but often to the point of rolling eyes - here they go again - of our other family members). We have both slowed down on it in recent years but the interest remains strong even if the activity has waned.
We have been lucky in that various family members in previous generations on both sides of our family have engaged in genealogical research before us. This meant we had lots of material to work with which is often not the case in many families.
This too however can present some challenges.
On my fathers side of the family my great-great-great-grandfather Dr. William White left us a small book in which he hand wrote several generations worth of family genealogy. It is a wonderful treasure. But there are sections of it that are quite wrong.
For his generation, his children, nieces, nephews generation, his parents generation and small parts of various in-laws it is quite accurate and has proven to be incredibly helpful as a starting place for fleshing out the record and filling in the blank spots.
Much further back then his grandparents however it goes terribly wrong.
It was a fashion in his day to claim ancestry from the first European settlers and this he did. He detailed his ancestry back to the White's of the Mayflower through 2 or 3 generations that don't exist in my family or in the Mayflower White's.
One of the first things my brother and I had to do was learn to verify records. This means learning about the difference between primary and secondary sources. Even respected genealogy books have inaccuracies. Head stones and death certificates sometimes don't agree. Baptismal dates are mistaken for birth dates and in frontier life there were times when an entire family would be baptised on the same day years after their births. Obtaining vital records, birth, death, marriage certificates, is critical in creating an accurate family history.
Similarly, if you do not have family records to start your journey... and even if you do frankly... one of the first steps to take is to start with what you know. Start the record with the births, deaths, marriage, residences, occupations of yourself, your siblings, your parents, Aunts, Uncles and Grandparents. Interview your parents. Ask them for the dates and addresses but even more so ask them to tell the stories. If your grandparents are still alive or someone else of their generation, do the same with them.
Today we have the advantage of recording technology. If they aren't intimidated by it try setting up a video camera or at least a tape recorder. We recently got my Dad and his sister together and video taped a session in which we prompted them to reminisce about growing up together. It was lots of fun and a couple of off-hand comments from my Aunt provided a couple clues I had never heard before on a previously dead-end line of the family.
When my brother and I were first starting out he interviewed our one remaining grandparent and took extensive notes.
Be Aware!
Grandma loooooved to tell stories! And tell them she did. True or not. Embellished or not. This was fun and very valuable but it meant that everything had to be verified and if what she said didn't match the facts found elsewhere... what she said needed to be discarded... just like our Mayflower ancestry.
On my Mothers side of the family our Great Aunt Mable, a wonderful woman and D.A.R. member who lived to be 105, left an extensive record of the family genealogy. But it was thin. Names, dates, places. Nothing else. And NO sources!
We have had to go back through and cover all the ground she did in order to be sure of its accuracy. She was incredibly accurate. We have found only a few mistakes but it has been tedious and time consuming to go back over what she had already done. Her lack of sourcing also made it very difficult to research some of it or to extend her work.
If you are researching... document everything. To a certain degree you want to document your dead ends too. White is a common name. In searching for family I have often traced other White family lines in order to rule them out as part of my own. And some time later found that I was tracing the exact same non-family line all over again because I didn't document having traveled that dead-end already. What a frustrating waste of time and effort!
Old family letters, if available, are often a gold mine. Save them, preserve them. Get a scanner and scan them so that you can re-read them without having to handle them and cause deterioration.
Family letters often tell what Aunt Susie is doing and provide hints about where she and Uncle Tom are living or which of their kids were just born. Save the envelopes and scan them into the same pdf file as the letters. The postmark, return address, etc provide valuable information. I have also gone back and re-read letters several times. A comment or name that has no meaning when you first start all of a sudden jumps out at you after you have added several branches to the family tree.
Letters are also gold in that they give us more meat on the old and moldy family bones. Genealogy that consists merely of the names, dates and places is nice but when you can learn about their actual lives, concerns and their places in history it is invigorating and fascinating.
Most of us are not related to Presidents and Kings except in the most distant of ways in which we are all eventually related. But all of our families are involved in what I like to call "Small History." This is the real history of the world. These are the real family stories that add meat to the bones of what we learn in our history books in school.
For instance, we learn in school about the Scopes Monkey Trial but we don't learn about how its repercussions affected average families across America.
Most of my family lines go back to the early days of European settlement of America. We started in Massachusetts, after a couple generations migrated to the wilds of western Mass after the coastal areas filled up and after the revolution migrated to the wild frontier of western New York. In local history books of this town or that town I have found entries referring to family members as early settlers that built the first grist mill or surveyed and laid out the road that connected these new isolated villages, and so forth. This is how America was built. The first Doctor or shopkeeper. The town meetings at which someone was elected Judge and someone else Captain of the militia because he happened to have had experience as a private in the revolution.
These are the things that make genealogy truly interesting. Who were our forefathers and foremothers? (and why does my spellcheck accept forefathers but not foremothers?) What positions did they take on the issues of the day? Were they Jacksonians? Or did they think Jackson and his brand of democracy represented the devils work and destruction of America? I have one family letter in which a father in Buffalo is catching up family news to his daughter who has moved away with her husband to Chicago in which he tells how a brother is doing very well "But I wish he was in a different trade." What trade did Dad disapprove of? After long research I finally found him on a Milwaukee census record... he was a liquor salesman!
My current research project is a little closer to home. This past Thanksgiving Day I came into possession of my grandfathers papers. A real treasure trove!
You can meet my grandfather here.
He was a Professor of Finance and economist from the 20's through the 50's. You can learn about some of his still pertinent views on economics here.
Or, as linked above in relations to the Scopes trial, you can learn about some of his religious views here.
And his youthful idealistic views on war and peace here.
I'll be writing more on him and thanks to the creation of this group will be able to present them in a genealogical context as well as their political contexts. It's a lot of fun and it helps to shape and inform more deeply my own views on what America is and what it should be.