Tracing Your Family History

by Alan Ross

These are questions some of us will ask ourselves or our oldest living relative at some point or another. Genealogy is both a study of history and a resolution of one’s personal quest.

It could be the warm company of a favorite relative, a sentimental stickpin or brooch, or a dog-eared black-and-white photograph of a great-grandparent. Almost anything with nostalgic attachment can act as a touchstone triggering a desire to look into one’s past.

For Joanne Cooper of North Ferrisburg, Vt., it was an old autograph book from her mother’s family in Pennsylvania that, incredibly, she wound up buying at eBay, the Internet auction site. The precious artifact contained not only her mother’s and father’s signatures before they were married but those of her grandparents and great-grandparents. The find launched an inquiry for Cooper into the great wide world of genealogy. Once a daunting and time-consuming task, fleshing out family trees has become a popular phenomenon because of the advent of a trusty and speedy researcher—the home computer.

“I never would have approached doing this without the computer,” Cooper, 48, says. “My first efforts were mostly hunting and pecking.”

That was four years ago. Cooper who dabbles in genealogy as a hobby, says there is a well-worn route to putting you on the trail of your own family’s history.

“It’s easy to get off on tangents with most of the sites that are out there,” she says. “There’s so much coming at you. I’ll go in looking for something specific but another thing will catch my eye, and I’ll get sidetracked.”

That experience happens to many first-time searchers. Without a plan, it’s easy to become overwhelmed.

“Start with your immediate family sources,” Cooper advises. “Parents, grandparents, and any living relatives—get every name, date, and place that you can possibly squeeze out of them; any inscription in an old Bible, a photo album, or letters. Anything that they’ve saved.”

The next step is to organize it all. Though Cooper recommends using applicable software, at the minimum get a three-ring notebook to keep charts and notes together, plus a file folder to store hard-copy certificates, documents, and records you accumulate along the way.

“Keep correspondence that people send, as well as email addresses,” she adds. “One advantage to organizing with software is you can print it out from time to time. If your computer crashes, which has happened to me, then you’ve at least got a copy of everything.”

Cooper researches not only her own Southern roots but also her mother’s Northeastern family and her husband’s French-Canadian and Scottish-Irish heritage.

“I’m all over the map,” she says enthusiastically. “Every week seems to open up a new discovery. This past week was the first time my husband and I learned his great-grandparents’ names, (and) where they were from in Canada.”

Naturally, in an endeavor where records don’t always fall easily into place, unexpected pitfalls occur. Though well-intentioned people contribute what they believe is true to various online genealogies, the information is not always verified.

“Unless you can actually see the document, go to the place itself, or see the item of record online, you can’t necessarily take it to be true,” Cooper says. “There is a lot of misleading information in family trees because, quite simply, people make mistakes.

“Ancestry.com, though, has been especially helpful,” she says, referring to a genealogy website. “In some instances you’ll even get into the records themselves, at other times they’ll have charts and lists of names for you. Their database is fantastic. I have found more with them in the last three months than I have in the last four years combined.”

Ancestry.com carries several membership plans that include fees. Lesser versions of many of the better programs can be downloaded for free, Cooper says. If you do not own a computer, visit your local public library to get online.

In Tullahoma, Tenn., Dick Hudson has been filling in the blanks of his family’s roots for the last four years, while assisting members of the Highland Rim Scottish Society, to which Dick belongs, with their ancestry searches.

“So many folks have no knowledge of their heritage,” Hudson says. “I got interested in mine in the process of helping the Scottish society. Then I really got fascinated with it.”

Hudson shares the belief with Cooper that in today’s era there’s really only one way to climb the family tree.

“It’s almost an imperative that one do it online,” he says. It’s also vital that searchers dig for accurate information. “If someone runs a genealogy search, all manner of things will come back. For a lot of people, that may be all that they will do. If that’s where you stop, you’re going to have very limited and also very poor data, because it’s not going to be substantiated like it ought to be,” Hudson says.

Hudson agrees with Cooper that ancestry.com is one of the better sites to get you on your way. “But I would start first with rootsweb.com,” he says. “It’s free.”

Even the most dogged researcher, Hudson says, will inevitably encounter the dreaded “dead end”—the end of the line, where information appears to halt or cannot be unearthed.

“I have a couple of current dead ends in my family,” Hudson says. “Those are considered temporary. You never think that you’re just at a complete standstill.”

Fortunately for both Cooper and Hudson, caring relatives, who employed the old-style, hands-on research approach, laboriously pieced together chunks of their respective family histories. It has enabled the two to pick up their heritage at points on down the genealogical line.

Both have managed to trace their lineage back to the 1500s. Cooper mentions that an old book lying around the house when she was growing up detailed a portion of her mother’s family history, going all the way back to the 16th century.

“That was the first instance of something clicking in my head about all this,” she says. “I thought, ‘Wow! You can really find out about your family back to then?’ After I had my own children, it made me want to know more of why we were the way we were.”

Among Hudson’s discoveries was finding two relatives on opposite sides of the Revolutionary War—one a Patriot, one a Loyalist. But his most famous ancestor, forever remembered astride a horse, was a legendary football player.

“I’m related to Don Miller, one of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame,” Hudson says with pride, referring to the legendary backfield from Notre Dame’s 1924 football team.

With a collective debt of gratitude to the hard-earned efforts of their previous family-tree seekers, Hudson and Cooper dig on, happy to embrace the past with the powerful technological arms of the present. Though the old ways have become a relic of ancient history itself, their advantages and tradition are, nonetheless, to be respected.

“I think it becomes necessary at some point,” says Hudson, referring to visits to courthouses and other places of official record. “I don’t think you can ever abandon that.”

As hazy names long buried surface once more through the passionate efforts of people like Joanne Cooper and Dick Hudson, an air of anticipation coupled with intense personal satisfaction permeates genealogical investigations for all. As Hudson admits, “It’s been something to learn. And it won’t finish in my lifetime.”

Alan Ross is a freelance writer from Monteagle, Tenn.

first appeared: 2/18/2001