Scraps of Stories
Way back when Terence and I were first married, I got obsessed with tracking down his family history. Really, there is no better way to put it. I'd always been interested in family history (genealogy, we usually called it back then) but I didn't need to research my own family line. At least it felt that way-- I had family members who had been tracking that information for generations. I could go to family reunions and hear stories about great-great-grandparents. But on Terence's side, he knew very little and I knew nothing at all. I caught the research bug after my first night at our little stake family history library, when I found Terence's grandfather in the Social Security Death Index on a greenish computer screen. I would come each week when the library was open (it was open one night a week), place my baby on the floor with some toys, and labor to load census record pages with the snail-paced dial up internet connection. Eventually, when we moved to Arizona and I had both M and J, I discovered the large family history center next to the Mesa temple. Here I could order microfilms of marriage records for Mississippi and scroll through them. I literally saved a couple of dollars a paycheck so that I could pay the shipping fees for these microfilms, and when I got the call that one was in, I was so excited!!! I would use the little free time I got as a mom of a 2 year old and an infant to stare at old marriage licenses.
When we moved to Sanders, my parents gifted me a year long subscription to Ancestry.com. It was awesome beyond belief! I had 24 hour access to the census images that had been released, even though most of them hadn't been indexed yet. It meant that I could browse myself, trying to find those elusive ancestors of my husband and children. (I had ultra-slow-dial-up then, even for the times. Nothing like rural life to make you appreciate the internet options of the city. I would spend one minute scanning a census image for a familiar last name, click the next button, and work on a chore or attend to the kids for the next ten minutes, and come back to find that the next image had finally loaded. Needless to say, it took me a looooong time to make my way through the census records.)
By the time we made our first trip out to Mississippi with the kids, I brought a scrapbook I had made for his grandmother that included a family tree that I had made from tracking her line as far back as I could go.
There came a point when I got stuck though. There were lines I just couldn't go any further on. Slavery is like a 50 foot concrete barrier when it comes to family history research. Unless you happen to have an ancestor who belonged to a slaveowner who kept meticulous personal records of his slaves by name and age, it's pretty much impossible to find anything out. I have plenty of side lines that could be researched, but so many of them are women who married and I have no idea to whom. More often than not they did not get a marriage license so there was no record for me to find. And on more than one line, the names are so common that I just don't have enough information to know whether I have the right person or not. At last, since my life was pulling me sixteen different directions anyway, I put it aside and it kind of faded to the background. (I still did indexing, but that wasn't the same. It didn't have the same kind of obsessive hold on me.)
Years have passed and so many records are online now. There are more areas where we can try again on some of those dead ends. I also received a bunch of information from a cousin of Terence's that gives us a whole bunch of leads on his biological father's side. But though I've tried to get back into it, I've found it so much harder than it used to be.
For all that life was busier (in some ways) with little kids, it was busy in a way that still allowed me to focus on that kind of research in my head, if that makes sense. The lines I was working on, what I knew and what I didn't know, were always clear in my mind. I can't keep it straight now. My brain is filled to the brim with trying to keep hold of everything in my kids' lives (and on my own calendar) so when I sit down to research, I draw a complete blank. I can't remember who I was last researching and where I left off. I can't remember where I got stuck.
It's killing me, and worse, sapping my enthusiasm for something that used to be a passion.
So today, I decided to take a completely different approach. I turned back to my own line. On familysearch.com they now have a section called "Memories" where you can post pictures and share stories. You know me, I love a good story. And I would love to see stories from my ancestors' lives! Tidbits that would give me an idea of what they were really like and what they experienced. Of course, there's not much on there, at least not much that I didn't already know. But then it occurred to me that I have now lost all of my grandparents. The stories they told, the experiences I had personally with them, those will be gone soon if they don't get recorded. And someday my children or grandchildren might love to know. So today I got on there and wrote a "story" for each of my grandparents. I took a memory of each of them, something I had been told about personally by them or experienced firsthand with them, and wrote it up. They weren't very long, but they do give a snippet of who my grandparents were. The plan is to continue to add to that-- maybe with memories with my parents or my own experiences also, so that someday they will be there for those who come after.
Connections, forward and back. Something I feel passionate about!
When we moved to Sanders, my parents gifted me a year long subscription to Ancestry.com. It was awesome beyond belief! I had 24 hour access to the census images that had been released, even though most of them hadn't been indexed yet. It meant that I could browse myself, trying to find those elusive ancestors of my husband and children. (I had ultra-slow-dial-up then, even for the times. Nothing like rural life to make you appreciate the internet options of the city. I would spend one minute scanning a census image for a familiar last name, click the next button, and work on a chore or attend to the kids for the next ten minutes, and come back to find that the next image had finally loaded. Needless to say, it took me a looooong time to make my way through the census records.)
By the time we made our first trip out to Mississippi with the kids, I brought a scrapbook I had made for his grandmother that included a family tree that I had made from tracking her line as far back as I could go.
There came a point when I got stuck though. There were lines I just couldn't go any further on. Slavery is like a 50 foot concrete barrier when it comes to family history research. Unless you happen to have an ancestor who belonged to a slaveowner who kept meticulous personal records of his slaves by name and age, it's pretty much impossible to find anything out. I have plenty of side lines that could be researched, but so many of them are women who married and I have no idea to whom. More often than not they did not get a marriage license so there was no record for me to find. And on more than one line, the names are so common that I just don't have enough information to know whether I have the right person or not. At last, since my life was pulling me sixteen different directions anyway, I put it aside and it kind of faded to the background. (I still did indexing, but that wasn't the same. It didn't have the same kind of obsessive hold on me.)
Years have passed and so many records are online now. There are more areas where we can try again on some of those dead ends. I also received a bunch of information from a cousin of Terence's that gives us a whole bunch of leads on his biological father's side. But though I've tried to get back into it, I've found it so much harder than it used to be.
For all that life was busier (in some ways) with little kids, it was busy in a way that still allowed me to focus on that kind of research in my head, if that makes sense. The lines I was working on, what I knew and what I didn't know, were always clear in my mind. I can't keep it straight now. My brain is filled to the brim with trying to keep hold of everything in my kids' lives (and on my own calendar) so when I sit down to research, I draw a complete blank. I can't remember who I was last researching and where I left off. I can't remember where I got stuck.
It's killing me, and worse, sapping my enthusiasm for something that used to be a passion.
So today, I decided to take a completely different approach. I turned back to my own line. On familysearch.com they now have a section called "Memories" where you can post pictures and share stories. You know me, I love a good story. And I would love to see stories from my ancestors' lives! Tidbits that would give me an idea of what they were really like and what they experienced. Of course, there's not much on there, at least not much that I didn't already know. But then it occurred to me that I have now lost all of my grandparents. The stories they told, the experiences I had personally with them, those will be gone soon if they don't get recorded. And someday my children or grandchildren might love to know. So today I got on there and wrote a "story" for each of my grandparents. I took a memory of each of them, something I had been told about personally by them or experienced firsthand with them, and wrote it up. They weren't very long, but they do give a snippet of who my grandparents were. The plan is to continue to add to that-- maybe with memories with my parents or my own experiences also, so that someday they will be there for those who come after.
Connections, forward and back. Something I feel passionate about!
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