Meredith Heath, aunt to nephews A, B, and C, erstwhile graduate student, and coffee master extraordinaire, writes about her feelings of loss during a period of transition in the lives of her nephews. An avid aunt for nearly six years and surrogate aunt to countless (no, really) other nieces and nephews, Meredith spends much of her free time with “the babies.” When not playing with the little ones or serving a hot cup o’ Joe at the local coffee shop, Meredith can be found researching family history, reading texts from the literary canon she missed during ten years of college, and wrangling ideas about how to return to graduate school without paying for tuition.

Before there were PCs, there were word processors. Not word processing software like Microsoft Word, but actual word processors: machines that in appearance mirrored a bulkier PC but were only capable of allowing the user to type a document, save it to a floppy disc, and hope to goodness there weren’t any strong magnets nearby. Better than a typewriter that only allowed the user to white-out errors and type over them, a word processor had a delete function – a marvelous invention surpassed perhaps only by parachute pants and slap bracelets.

I spent an entire summer in middle school scrunched up for hours in front of one such screen. Somehow I had wrangled a typewritten copy of my paternal grandmother’s family history dating back prior to the Revolutionary War, but it was old and flimsy, and I was convinced I could preserve it better via the assistance of our handy dandy word processor. I think a hard copy of that summer’s work is still floating around somewhere in the family coffers, but the margins are offset and the page breaks disjointed by a faulty 20th century printer.

I eventually abandoned that project, but the names and stories tinkered around in my mind for years. As I acquired new names and information from our family ties, I felt increasingly motivated to conduct the actual grunt work of nailing down accurate dates and other data in order to fill out the branches of our family tree. I needed to know where the auburn hair and blue eyes had come from and where I fit into history’s epic tale.

At long last I bit the proverbial bullet and paid for a subscription to Ancestry.com, and I would spend months staying awake until the wee hours of the morning, rifling through census records, marriage and death certificates, military draft cards for WWI and WWII, and residential and burial records for family who had lived in my hometown. When I would complain about being tired, my husband would so graciously remind me that it was my dead ancestors keeping me awake at night, but my research had finally come full circle in that I was able to confirm the online details with memories from that word processing document typed long ago.

I have redoubled my efforts in the last couple of years. Both my grandmothers have been diagnosed with mild- to moderate-level dementia, and one nearly lives within the context of her memories from WWII, while the other has never been too helpful with information outside the realm of her immediate family. My nephews are here now, too, and I would like for them to have an idea of their heritage, or at least half of it. I can offer that to them, and, really, our history is a gift to myself. One day both of my grandmothers will be gone, and their stories will be all that I have left.

If you and your nieces and nephews are interested in researching your own family history, some of the following hints may help you along your way.

1. You don’t have to have a subscription to Ancestry.com or another such source, although they are extremely helpful.
Family tree software is available for purchase, and you can store, arrange, and edit your family tree within. A multitude of other resources are also useful for digging up information. Many counties have birth, death, marriage, and divorce certificates available online or at county public health offices, and you can request official copies from the state, although often for a fee.
 
Cemeteries, especially historically significant ones, can house an overwhelming amount of information. When I went to find my grandfather’s grave at one of the oldest cemeteries in our county, a staff member gave me a photocopy of the original plot purchase, along with the names and birth and death dates of every individual buried there. This document alone helped me confirm the identity of my grandfather’s grandmother and eventually led me to records from Brooklyn, NY, where her grandfather had served as mayor.
 
Don’t forsake libraries in your quest for knowledge. If you have the patience to scan through newspaper microfiche reels to find obituaries, you may also pinpoint other family members or schools and churches your ancestors attended. Take your nieces and nephews along, and demonstrate how libraries can be used for more than just borrowing books.
 
2. Start with what you are sure you know.
Fortunately for me, I had quite a few solid facts regarding ancestors several generations back, but even these details were blurry through the fog of handwritten historical documents and inaccurate digitization of the information therein. For instance, despite knowing my great-grandfather’s complete name and birth, death, and marriage dates, it took me six months to find his census records because “Marcus” had become “Morus” when someone transcribed his name.
 
3. Be persistent. Ask questions.
Curious nieces and nephews can be extremely helpful in this regard. You never know when an inquiry might jog someone’s memory. Case in point, my grandmother remembered very little of her family, yet she called one day, having recalled her maternal grandmother’s name. It happened to not even be the correct name, but it was close enough that eventually I was able to confirm her identity via residential records, a death certificate, and the burial records mentioned above.

4. Use your cousins.
I am serious. You will meet them if you use an online family research tool. In the process of researching the family history, young nieces and nephews may be delighted or curious to meet and interact with new family members. I have met several of mine, and none of them are wackos, I promise. They have all been extremely helpful in directing me to new information and family members because we all have the same end goal: to preserve our communal family history. Through one of them, my parents and I rediscovered one of our family reunions, after which my cousin took us on a brief tour of some local cemeteries in the county where my grandparents were born. Through her, I “met” my great-great-grandparents and my grandfather’s little brother for the first time.

If your ultimate goal is to become an expert genealogist, know that there are a host of other resources available to you, as you seek more specific information about your family. Even so, merely these tools and an unquenchable passion for finding my family have guided me thus far, and I have six entirely complete generations of direct ancestors and living family members complete in our family tree. It is doable. Time-consuming, but doable and entirely worth it because your story is worth telling, too.

Photo: worradmu
Published: May 21, 2013