Family History

Last week’s Relatively Speaking column of the Norman Transcript newspaper featured “Finding Immigrant Ancestors”, a great story about how to research your ancestors by beginning with their arrival, moving forward to today, and then going back in time over the sea.

For many years when fellow researchers shared their plans for an overseas trip I would tell them I had to get my ancestors to the shores of America before I could plan an overseas trip.

I no longer can say that as I now know the immigrating ancestors for many of my family lines, which begin with my Hatt line and branches off to include Stout, Throckmorton, Compton and others.

…Check to see if others are researching your family names, as this research step has been a lifesaver for me.

As a descendant of John Throckmorton, who was in Rhode Island by 1631, research has opened many lines that would take me to England, Spain, Scotland, Ireland, Russia, France and other countries.

All this was made possible by the research of Robert Coggeshall, who shares John Throckmorton (my 11th great-grandfather) as his ancestor as well as mine. Mr. Coggeshall is descended from John’s daughter, Patience, and I descended from her sister, Deliverance.

I’ve heard many times things like “who cares if they are our 6th cousin three times removed – that’s not related!” Well, folks, it is. And if I, a sixth cousin three times removed, is researching my family line that ties into your family line, we have something in common: clues to our family history puzzle.

One of the great keys to tracing your family history is not just finding those family connections, but finding those family connections with information on your family connections. That will help you get on the boat and cross the sea to trace your family’s history beyond the border.

In an article by The Eagle newspaper online, “Local Group Uses DNA in Genealogy”, a local genealogy group is using DNA to help trace their ancestors, but also their living cousins.

“The process starts when you join a surname organization, and they put you in touch with a testing lab,” Duncan said. “You get a testing kit and submit your DNA. The lab sends the results to the surname society, and they notify you of any matches.”…

“My DNA matched that of a guy in South Carolina,” Duncan said. “I’ll compare notes with him. He may have data on the Duncan family that I don’t have. If nothing else, it might help me know where to look.”

Duncan’s research has traced his family back to a male relative who lived in South Carolina in 1778. The DNA connection may help him find the father or brother of this ancestor.

While DNA testing is a great way to connect back in time with your ancestors, the fact that it can help you connect with the living is even more exciting. Who knows what research and finds they may have uncovered in their family history that will fill in the blanks with yours.

There are many surname DNA testing sites on the Internet. For USD$20-40, it’s a cheap way to potentially uncover a gold mine of family history.

The Albuquerque Tribute’s Mary Penner has written “Planning Will Save Your Family History Project”, a really good overview of why and how you need to plan your family history research project.

Consider these obstacles: You want to cover 200 or more years of history; you have thousands of names in the family tree; you have copies of odd-shaped original documents including wills, deeds, licenses, letters; you have photographs; you have charts and timelines. And to top it all off, the research isn’t finished. It’s never finished.

How can researchers take mounds of research, organize it in a way that won’t baffle all of your relatives, and compress it into a book that weighs less than 50 pounds?

Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula, but before you sit down and type “Chapter One,” sketch out a plan to guide you through the process.

Whether you are creating a family history scrapbook, book, or blog, get your plan in order to figure out what you want to do, what you will include, and then how you will put all the pieces together to make this into a single family history project.

Penner offers excellent guidelines on a step-by-step approach to planning your family history compilation.

Your Brother Kinds has an interesting post on “Preservation and dissemination” that caught my eye. Canterbury5 writes about how a recent purchase of old family history documents promotes a great deal of thought and consideration:

What I have been thinking about is the responsibility that goes along with possessing such things. The loss of old documents to fire, weather, theft, and just plain age is a commonly-cite source of frustration and anger to our hobby and historians generally. Every time a government building or a church burned down, back in the day, volumes of records of the most important events in so many peoples’ lives went up too.

Over the last few years, as I have moved from dabbling in this hobby to being a bit rabid about it, I have tracked down and handled a wide variety of old papers. I doing so, I have found them in every manner of state and condition. A distressing few properly preserved; some slapped together in a folder and placed in a box that no one has touched in 50 years; a great many wrongly indexed or not indexed at all, slowly rotting as the clock ran out on their usefulness.

Putting all of this together, I get the sense that I have a responsibility to the documents themselves.

This is something that worries me greatly. Not long ago, after a family member begged for years to gain access to her family home’s attic, historical documents and photographs, she was finally given permission to take three boxes of things out at a time. She gathered three overflowing box loads, took them home and copied and scanned everything she could. She had returned two of them, with one still in her possession when the family home burned to the ground, taking with it several generations of history. The only pieces left were in the one box she had not yet returned.

My father’s family bible from the 1700s and photo albums, some dating back over 100 years ago, sit in his cigarette smoke filled house that is damp and leaking. Some of the oldest albums have mildew and signs of fungus on them. They all stink horribly, even our own current day photo albums not more than 20 years old. The risk of damage to these is hovering over them, but he refuses to allow me to take them or put them in more protective storage.

Other family members have been incredibly open and gracious, sharing every ounce of information, documentation, photographs, and recordings they have to help us document our family history, so those that cling and hang, make it harder for the rest of us, but when we do get access to original family history material and artifacts, that ownership does come with a very high level of responsibility. And insecurity.

So I identified totally with this post. It makes me stop and think about how to preserve this information without risking it.