Our own records
The advice for beginning genealogists is always the same:
Begin with what we know.
And so, dutifully, we open up that pedigree chart or that relational database and we enter ourselves in box 1… and, in so many cases, immediately move on.
Our parents. Their births and their marriages and, all too often even by the time we get interested in genealogy, their deaths.
Our grandparents and the same vital data for them.
Maybe we’ll enter a bit more about those older generations — their schooling, their military service.
But wait a minute here.
What about ourselves?
What about our own histories?
How often do we just not get around to researching and documenting our own lives?
This past week, The Legal Genealogist was coordinating a course at the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh called Women and Children First! Research Methods for the Hidden Half of the Family.
And in the course of putting together the lecture on research in newspapers, just on a whim, I started looking at my own immediate family history.
I knew, for example, that we had moved into the house where I grew up in the fall of 1954.
I can now tell you who owned the house before us… who the realtor was who sold it… and even who the lawyers were for the buyer and the seller.1
Yep, poking through the now-digitized newspapers for the area where I grew up in Central New Jersey, I found a lot about my own family — and my own childhood.
I found the birth announcements of all five of my younger siblings, for example,2
I found that one family baptism made the papers: my own. Well, not just my own. You see, apparently, at some point when my brother Fred was not quite a year old, my raised-as-a-Lutheran father got tired of having a house full of heathens and marched us all down to the local Lutheran Church.
I remember the discussion with Pastor Robert Strohl who reminded my father that Lutherans believed in infant baptism and his gentle chiding that my brother hadn’t yet been baptized. And I remember the look on Pastor Strohl’s face when he realized it wasn’t just the toddler — but four others ranging up to the age of 12.3
Apparently having five kids from the same family baptized at once was unusual enough to make the local paper.
Some of what I found, I remember. But some I didn’t. I do remember I was in Brownie Scouts as a kid, but was never able to be a Girl Scout. The only troop in the area with an opening met on Thursday afternoons, the time my mother inevitably had an appointment with her obstetrician and I needed to be home to care for that growing brood of younger siblings while yet another one was on the way.
So I remember being a Brownie, I remember flying up (graduating into Girl Scouts) and I remember being so disappointed that I wasn’t able to be in the Girl Scouts.
What I didn’t, and still don’t, actually remember is that my own mother was one of my Brownie troop leaders.4
There’s a lot more that I found… and boy did it drive home the lesson.
Yes, we do need to start with what we know.
But that starts with us, ourselves.
And we need to research and document our own lives as thoroughly as we do any other member of our families.
SOURCES
- New Brunswick (NJ) Home News, 26 Sep 1954, p. 25; digital images, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 25 July 2018). ↩
- Each announcement was in the column for births at Middlesex General Hospital. Each just said son or daughter, but they’re all there: boy, February 28; girl, November 11; boy, November 24; boy, June 7; boy, October 6. New Brunswick (NJ) Home News, various dates; digital images, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 25 July 2018). ↩
- New Brunswick (NJ) Home News, 10 Oct 1961; digital images, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 25 July 2018). ↩
- New Brunswick (NJ) Home News, 21 Nov 1958, p. 6. c.1; digital images, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 25 July 2018). ↩
Great article. Thanks to my mother (decluttering the house after my father died) I have a treasure trove of items from my youth. An archive safe “memory box” was cheap and now holds those items, waiting for my grandchildren to want to know more about Granddad.
Judy,
Though I have no children, thus no grandchildren, who will ever ask questions about grandma, I’ve ended up doing some research on myself anyway. Like Tim, a lot showed up when my mother moved into assisted living in her 90s. For more than 10 years, I was in a writing class in my retirement home. Virtually everybody was documenting their own lives for their descendants. So I began doing the same, in a sporadic way. I didn’t so much dig into the vital statistics, but my parents had been great storytellers about the family, so I knew a lot from that. I also have a good memory, going back as far as age 2 in some episodes. So did my mother, into her late 90s, and when we talked about family, she could correct me. She lived to be 100 and 11 months, and loved getting together with her kids and sharing memories. Eventually, I went to newspapers and other sources, but I really have documented quite a lot about my own life, should any nieces and nephews care. At least some of them are grateful that I’ve taken it upon myself to be the family historian!
Doris
Doris, I am betting that at least one of your nieces and nephews will be glad you’ve added details about yourself to that family tree. It will make all of it more meaningful to them. I had an aunt by marriage (actually to m y dad’s cousin) that I was close to, and who knew my dad’s family long before she married into it. I was interviewing her when she mentioned wistfully that she didn’t know much about her own family. Since she was already in her 90s I dropped everything to focus for a while on hers, and was able to give here a family tree going back six generations for all but one of her lines. She had no children of her own, but I felt as if she were a second mother to me. She has an honored place in our family tree, too.
I do have children, and one of the things I wanted to do is to leave my stories for them. So in addition to the genealogy, I have drawn from my journals to give them, I hope, a sense of my life at various times. One of my grandchildren is a natural genealogist, and even in preschool began asking me questions about my life, about my family, and about her parents. She has also interviewed as many of her living relatives as she can.
Now another grandchild, in her teens, has become interested in her mother’s life and has asked me for help in documenting it. I plan on sharing not only what I can of her mother’s childhood and young adulthood, but all the amazing people in our family going back. How lucky am I to have had both elders whose stories I cherish, and young relatives who want to gather and preserve family stories and lore.
My older half-brother was baptised. I have a record of this. I was never baptised. I should document this so that my descendant genealogists do not spend the time looking for one.
These old newspapers are a wonderful source of information. My county newspaper had columns from all the little rural communities. My aunt, mother and I were all correspondents. In one instance, a gentleman in the county died. Not only was his death mentioned in his home community, but when all the relatives came for the funeral they visited all the other relatives in other little communities. At least five other columns reported all these events!I have derived much pleasure in reading these old papers on microfilm at my state archives and now the best part: most of them are on newspapers.com!