Tidy Tidbits: Discovering One’s Forebears

DELVING INTO ONE’S PAST

In my experience, individuals start getting seriously interested in genealogy, their family’s past, when they hit their 50’s.  Middle age has settled in, the kids are grown or on their way out the door, and curiosity about one’s forebears rises to the fore.  In my extended family, my Uncle John, my mother’s youngest brother, was the one with the bug.  He wrote letters to relevant historical societies, searched archives, and visited Texas where my grandfather was born.  He completed the detailed paper fill-in-the-blanks family tree  forms (invaluable) which were pre-Internet.  To a lesser degree, his older brother, my Uncle Bill who lived in Dallas, assisted.  And being the family’s resident librarian, I was enlisted to investigate the occasional query.  Much of this legwork took place in the 80’s and into the early 90’s.  Long before Geni and well before the rise of Google.

Today researching one’s genealogy is made easier and faster by several online tools.  Perhaps the easiest one to begin with is geni.com.  You can quite easily create your own family tree for free and then go back and add to it as you have more information.  If you want to be made aware of possible matches for people in your tree, then there are several levels of membership for which you pay an annual fee.  I used just the free service for a long time and populated the tree on both sides of my family using the paper data sheets that Uncle John created.  Adding to Geni can be addictive; usually if I go online to add one date or place of birth or death, I end up looking at other records and puzzling about possible missing relatives.  In general, all deceased individuals are viewable by anyone who has set up a Geni account.

I have also found that just Googling a relative’s name and place of residence or year of death can result in a full obituary or a cemetery record with a photo of the gravestone.  Recently, I turned up the 1966 obituary for my great Uncle Ernst who died at the age of 90.  I well remember him, he was a bit confused in his dotage, but I had not known much about his earlier life.  Some families have also created extensive online records going back many generations so if you have a name that was prominent in history or very common, you might well find a treasure trove of data.  My mother’s maiden name is Hancock, and she and her siblings and many previous generations are all online!

My mother also kept some folders of family history, mostly her side, but also some on my father’s family.  I just received these from my sister.  Included was a journal of a train trip my great grandfather, James W. Findley (1849-1905), made across the U.S. in 1873 that my mother had already typed up.  And also a handwritten log of a trip he made by steamship from Philadelphia to Antwerp in 1878.  He was 29, and he spent about two months in Europe.  I’ve just completed the painstaking process of deciphering his account of the crossing and his penciled notes about where he stayed and what he did in Italy, France, Switzerland, and England.  Thanks to the Internet, I’ve found information about his ship and about some of his hotels, several of which exist today in one form or another.  Once I’ve completed my research, I’ll save the transcribed documents as a PDF in Dropbox and share them with my siblings and extended family.

If one becomes really serious about all this research, like my husband’s brother who has identified and documented relatives going back more than ten generations, then there are other sites and services such as ancestry.com and findagrave.com as well as suggested resources on the National Archives website.  However much you choose to do, it can be both a rewarding and a learning experience, providing perspective on those who came before you.

TRACKING TWENTY TITLES

In my self-imposed challenge to read twenty books before Sept. 1, I’ve just added another title to my list.

#7  The Heart is a Shifting Sea:  Love and Marriage in Mumbai by Elizabeth Flock

Emotionally impacted by her parents’ divorce and her father’s subsequent failed marriages, journalist Flock was attracted to the kind of love she saw among Indian couples she met.  She worked in Mumbai (aka Bombay) for two years beginning in 2008 and then returned in 2014 and 2015, but she remained in regular contact in those intervening years with three couples with whom she had become close.  Indian society, and Mumbai in particular, were changing rapidly during this time, more marriages were love matches and not arranged, and Western mores were making inroads.

In her book, in alternating chapters, Flock profiles these three couples’ first meeting, their courtship, and then their marriages, each with its own challenges, disappointments and joys.  Two of the couples are different classes of Hindu and the other couple are Sunni Muslims.  Religion and religious observances play a major role for each of them, but their view of love and romance is often influenced by how it’s portrayed in Bollywood films.  This is a fascinating and intimate account of life, love, and sex, that almost reads like a novel, but is nonjudgmental in its presentation.  What Katherine Boo did for the slums outside Mumbai in Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Elizabeth Flock does in even greater depth for marriage.  (~JWFarrington)

Notes: Header image from You Tube; It’s a Family from Wacissa UMC. and the book jacket from the author’s website.