Genealogical studies are a current preoccupation and hobby with many Americans. As life here becomes more demanding and complex, we want to know our roots. Where did we come from and how many names of relatives can we find?
There are a number of software programs to help find information, and there are Internet resources. Family letters can be a vital source of information. They often include the reason someone died, and that is important for those who are interested in compiling a medical genealogy. If you know to what diseases your ancestors succumbed, there may be risk factors that could be controlled so as to lessen the chance of your demise from the same ailment. Certain illnesses seem to be passed down through genetic material: diabetes, hemophilia, a proclivity toward developing cancer, and other diseases.
Sometimes, it is simply wonderful that someone has not discarded documents such as wedding invitations, birth announcements, newspaper clips of obituaries, driver’s licenses, tax records, and all sorts of other ephemera that can help to establish factual information. For example, I am happy that my mother saved so many obituaries, and old letters from people she left down south in Georgia and in Florida when she came north on the train, at the age of five.
Several members of my family are actively engaged in researching genealogy. It is just amazing the amount of information they are turning up. Census records are a great resource. Of course, in doing some research, some skeletons in the family closet are bound to show up. In larger families, that situation is even worse, as there are more people to which something could have gone wrong and it did.
What is even more fun is when one can connect the dots to match up a name, birth date, date of immigration, service records, places where a person lived, their photo(s), a list of their children and descendants, a knowledge of their occupation, etc.
I know that I have a lot of information about my family that no one else knows. I hope to be able to put that in writing or to verbally share that with family members before I forget some of it. Family information can easily be misinterpreted, misremembered, or misunderstood and this is how myths get started. Don’t believe anything without documentation. For example, if someone tells you that great-grandma made a quilt before the Civil War and she died in the 1940s and the fabrics in the quilt are from the 1970s, then it is pretty sure clue that great grandma did not make the quilt.
I think that genealogy is a fun project, especially when it leads to living cousins in other countries, and to nice people one has not known before. My family is huge and spread all over the globe. So, that makes it a challenge to figure out the whole situation.
Have fun shaking the apples out of your “family tree.”
Pat
I agree that it is a fun project, not only for the discovery of possible new relatives and people to meet, but also learning a bit more about what makes you tick as you assimilate these new folks/historical facts into your life awareness. Fascinating!