DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU CAME FROM

Do you ever wonder where you came from and where your roots are? Knowing who my ancestors were and where they came from has always intrigued me but, I’ll admit, the lazy part in me has always steered away from digging into my past. For one thing, it involves a lot of work and it’s one of those things that when you find one piece, that leads to another…there really is no end.

So, imagine how thrilled I was a couple years ago to meet one of Ron’s cousins, a few times removed, who literally lives and breathes genealogy. She has done extensive research on her family and has helped countless others find out their history. She is actually starting a business doing this for others.

How perfect is this for me! I have some history of my mother’s family but not my Dad’s. So, I became her first “client” and sent her what I knew about Dad’s history, which wasn’t a lot. Basically, I knew that he spent the first four years of his life on a riverboat on the St. Joe River in Michigan. His father worked on the boat which dredged the river while his mother was their cook.

He also told us that he spent summers growing up on his grandparents’ farm in Indiana. They were Amish which explains why he only spoke Pennsylvania Dutch until he was four years old.

His parents divorced when he was young and I never met his father so this was about all I had to go on, except for the names in the family back about two generations. What I really want is to find the Amish farm in Indiana where he spent so much time and see if I have any relatives living there yet.

So, I gave this info to Sarah, Ron’s cousin, and she went to work. Within a matter of a couple days, she had information on Dad and had pinpointed the area in LaGrange county in Indiana where his grandparents’ farm was. Wow!

Some of his grandfather’s grandkids could still be living on the farm…or not. So, I am planning a road trip to see what I find. I am so excited, this genealogy thing that I always thought was boring and was just lists of a lot of names just got up close and personal.

Those are the key words, what I find. She also found out some other things about Dad’s life that we never knew about. Nothing bad, nothing good in particular, just things that we never heard about. This brings up an important point, “How much do you really want to know?”

As I trudge along in this venture, Ron keeps asking me if I really want to know any more because, when you step into genealogy, you never know what you will find. I have always believed that knowing is better than the unknown, no matter what that knowing is. Not everyone agrees with me on this point so, before you go delving into your family history, decide if you are really prepared to find out the unknown.

One thing that Sarah found in Dad’s past was another marriage that none of us knew about. This only brings up more questions about my roots but definitely changes nothing about Dad. Sometimes we tend to put our parents and grandparents on pedestals and we feel that we fail to live up to their expectations. Uncovering truths through genealogy brings back the human side to them. I like that.

The more that I find, the more I want to know. The biggest lesson that I have learned from this is to not put “that genealogy thing” off for another day. So many times while growing up, I missed opportunities to ask Mom and Dad questions about their families and what their past was like. Life gets in the way and you always think you have plenty of time for things like this. Not so.

There are many resources out there that takes all the excuses away for putting off finding your family history. Family Tree Maker holds more than one family tree and you can keep adding to it. Ancestry.com and Family Tree Maker coordinate information with each other.

Find A Grave is a great place on the Internet to look for burial and other final disposition information about family. I had a friend who would go to local cemeteries and find tombstone information and take photos for people out of state who were looking for relatives. After finding it, she would upload it to Find A Grave.

There are other cemetery sites that will help in your search if you decide to do your family tree. American Battle Monuments Commission has information on more than 200,000 burials and memorials in overseas military cemeteries.

Billion Graves collects gravestone images, transcriptions and GPS data. You can register to search the site for free and with a membership comes more perks.

Interment.net is a free website that sources cemetery records from government offices, genealogical and historical organizations and individuals. There are special collections of burials and deaths related to flooded cemeteries and mine disasters. It is very forgiving by allowing for misspellings and name variants.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs runs the Nationwide Gravesite Locator site. You can search for burials of veterans and family members in VA national cemeteries, state veterans’ cemeteries and other military and private cemeteries.

There are numerous resources for anyone interested in doing their genealogy. It can be fascinating to find out where you came from and it can also be time consuming. However, with today’s aps and programs, it is easy to work on your tree, then leave it for a while and come back to it anytime.

The saying is so true that says, “Where you came from shapes where you are going.”