Are You the "Family Historian?"

Sometimes the interest in genealogy seems to skip a generation and sometimes family members just have no interest in learning about their family’s past. So, for those of us who feel a passion for family history, it falls to us to become the “family genealogist or historian.” That title became mine many years ago when I first expressed an interest in my family’s past by asking some questions of my paternal aunt.

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No one had asked her about my dad’s side of the family for an exceptionally long time, so she told me what she knew, which really was not too much. But she did leave a box of old family photographs, which were mostly unlabeled, to my brother who sent them to me. I certainly had heard very little of any family stories or history from my own father, either he was just not interested, or there were people and occurrences in his family that he and others in the family would just rather forget. Unfortunately, it mostly was forgotten and could have been lost.

So, a feeling arose in me that I could not quench. I wanted to find out more information about these mysterious people. It turns out that the blood that flowed in me was that of heroes, black sheep, ordinary people, and those who struggled in life with various diseases. Some were philanderers, and some suffered at the hands of others. They were real people who lived the lives that I had only heard about in the context of history classes during school. I did not want their stories to be lost.

I have Revolutionary War veterans, War of 1812 veterans, U.S. Civil War veterans, Spanish-American War veterans, WWI vets and WWII veterans (men and women), Korean War veterans, and Vietnam War vets. I truly knew little to nothing about these ancestors until I began studying and researching my family genealogy.

I learned that my great-grandfather had served in the U.S. Civil War. He lied about his age and enlisted in the Union Army when he was just 14 years old along with his older brothers and his father. They were so poor that my great-grandfather was sent to live and work on a faraway farm when he was just 11 years old. He was alone with strangers as were his brothers on other farms. One of his sisters died as a young girl. The unlabeled photo that I found of him looks so much like brothers, a merged version of them, that it is uncanny. I now know so much more about that period in our country’s history through researching my ancestors.

As a child, I had been to some of the cemeteries where my grandparents and great-grandparents had been laid to rest. My family went there to plant flowers next to their tombstones on Memorial Day, but I never really heard any of the practical details of their lives. The true stories about how and where they lived their lives were never discussed.

Two of my great-grandaunts were sisters and were never married. They lived together and took care of their father who lived well into his nineties. They died just one day apart from one another. So passionately were they devoted to one another that one could not bear to live without the other.

One of my great-grandfather’s daughters died in a psychiatric asylum when she was just 43 years old in 1915. Her husband had placed her there. I learned that most people who were involuntarily committed to asylums were not mentally ill but suffered from epilepsy, post-partum depression, alcoholism, or even syphilis that was caused by their spouse. The research I have done on those asylums is horrifying.

Through research, I found that my paternal grandparents were both married and divorced before they married each other. By searching various genealogical websites I found a digital copy of their marriage license application. I knew about my grandmother’s divorce but not about my grandfather’s. In fact, I am still working on that mystery.

One of my ancestors was hung at the gallows in the Boston Common in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1676 for his reported part in King Philip’s War. Since then I have learned that the early colonial period of our country’s history was a brutal and savage time in which to live. By researching my ancestor, history became a reality to me.

One of my ancestors immigrated to the colonies as an indentured servant with his five-year-old son. His wife, the child's mother, had died in England along with another young son.

As it turned out the five-year-old child, my seventh great-grandfather, served in the Revolutionary War. He is buried in an old cemetery in northcentral Pennsylvania along with ancestors from two later generations of his family. I have been there and learned more about the “War of 1776," (as the marker next to his grave reads) than I ever learned in a high school history class. He is my ticket to a national lineage society!

And one of the biggest surprises of all was that I am descended from two of the 103 Mayflower Passengers! That is...me and about thirty-five million other Americans! Who knew about that fact in my family? No one, as it turns out. The information was lost to our family until I researched it.

There were so many more corroborated historical facts that I learned about my paternal and maternal ancestors that I could go on about them for days. In fact, sometimes I provoke the glazed-over eyes of boredom from other family members and my husband!

Who would not love to learn about their ancestors and history? I honor their lives by writing their stories and their genealogies. If the mantle is passed to you to become the family historian, pick it up and run with it. You will not be sorry. What have you got to lose? You just may learn more about yourself in the process! And, you never know what interesting things you will learn!!

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