Starting Your Family Tree With What You Know

Write what you know. This has been preached to every creative writing student since the beginning of time. It's so ingrained in my psyche, that I've had to work hard to overcome it in my writing. If I only wrote what I knew about, I wouldn't have written even half of the things I've published over the years.

But this IS good advice for beginning your family tree ~ begin with what you know.

I had been marginally interested in our family tree for many decades.  My paternal grandparents prepared a scrapbook for my dad and his siblings with old photos of grandparents and great-grandparents on their side of the family when I 20-30 years old.  It was interesting, but I was too busy being a young person to put too much thought into it.

My maternal grandmother had a similar photo album/scrapbook, but she also had a loose family tree she had written down for reasons I never knew or no longer remember. I don't even know if she wrote it or if her Aunt Helen did. (I think Helen wrote some of it, for sure.) Grandma had some duplicate photos that she let me keep. I tucked them away, figuring I would get back to them at some time in the future.  I always thought I had more time.

My first ancestor photo - my 2 x Great Grandparents, Bertha and Henry (on the right)

Well, that time has come. I started climbing our tree (if you will) when Grandma was confined to a nursing home because her Parkinson's had made it too dangerous for her to be at home. There was an open staircase to the lower level of the house and her balance was such that we all worried she might topple down the stairs. Grandpa helped her along as she moved through the house, but if she started to tumble, there was no way he would be able to protect her from the fall ~ and in fact, would likely fall with her. 

This was the first time I really started to think of my grandparents as nearing the end of their lives. In my mind, they were always "about 70 and healthy" and I suppose I didn't want to see anything else. 

About this time, Grandma gave me her hand written family trees along with associated detailed notes.

I didn't yet appreciate what a gift all this information was, but it would soon become invaluable. Not knowing much about where to start or how to begin, I reached out to a genealogist friend of mine. We began with the information I already had and he was able to use Ancestry.com to follow my family tree back to their immigration to the U.S. One line of our tree was here during the Revolutionary War! (I love ancestry.com, but there have been frustrations and limitations to the information on their site, which I will get to in another post.)

I wished I had done this when Grandma was still able to share her stories. After she and my grandpa died, I stepped back away from the tree for a bit because of a job change and my writing pursuits.

In the last year, I've gotten back to digging through the past again. It's now that I most wish I had gotten to this point while Grandma and Grandpa were still alive. I have so many questions that they could probably have easily answered. Now my job will be more challenging and there are things I may just never know.

I got lucky, I think, that Grandma had all of the information she did. I've inherited a box full of loose photos and several photo albums and other family items that I treasure. But sadly, there was also a box full of photos lost to time and mildew. If I had known they were there, perhaps we could have moved them to a safer location. Now it's too late. 

If you learn nothing else from my experience, start talking to your older relatives now. Take notes or record the conversations for later. Don't wait, because you don't know what life is going to throw your way and you might not get another chance.