For years now I've thought of myself as a genealogist, but I need to face the fact. I'm not. What I am, is an expert leaf clicker. I joined ancestry.com a couple of years ago and started happily clicking away. A leaf popped up "yeah" it looked right, click.
I had a family tree that stretched across the miles and generations and then I realized that ancestry.com wasn't perfect. GASP! I realized it depended on mere humans to enter the majority of information from their own sources and some of those people made MISTAKES!
For months, I had convinced my husband that somewhere in his family, there was a name change and he must be Hispanic. His surname is Hindes (pronounced Heinz), but on one census list the name became Mendez. Wow, a break through...something the family didn't know. It was wrong, someone had overly scripted handwriting. Back to the drawing board.
The more I searched the less satisfied I was with just names and dates of births and deaths and maybe a marriage or two. This family had some real characters and not only that they followed patterns. Grandpa married the housekeeper, so did the other grandpa and so did dad. By the way, we aren't getting a housekeeper. There is a pattern of multiple marriages - Great-grandpa was married four times, Grandma three times, other grandpa two times, dad three times and mom twice. I myself am wife number three.
I don't want the genealogy, I want the stories to go along with the names and dates and so I begin my hunt for Red October...no that's a movie, but I bet my search could lead to at least one if not more movies of the week.
So how do I go about this hunt, this search for people I don't know? One step at a time. I'm backing up and starting over. So that when I'm done, my husband's family will have the story of their family as well as the names and dates. No more random clicking. Everything must be documented, vetted and then carefully cataloged for accuracy. Don't believe anyone. So to begin with, I need to find a record of birth for my husband that proves when and where he was born and more importantly who his parents were. Yes, he was there, but he wasn't in any condition to remember it.
Another thing, as I record pertinent records, I will make copies of them and keep everything in a lock box for safe keeping. No sense in gathering all of these records only to lose them somewhere down the line. My next step will be in keeping the records in some type of readable, or at least organized manner. Maybe a scrapbook, maybe a written manuscript. But first, I'm off to the courthouse to look for birth records with my handy dandy little camera in case I can't get the records.
I had a family tree that stretched across the miles and generations and then I realized that ancestry.com wasn't perfect. GASP! I realized it depended on mere humans to enter the majority of information from their own sources and some of those people made MISTAKES!
For months, I had convinced my husband that somewhere in his family, there was a name change and he must be Hispanic. His surname is Hindes (pronounced Heinz), but on one census list the name became Mendez. Wow, a break through...something the family didn't know. It was wrong, someone had overly scripted handwriting. Back to the drawing board.
The more I searched the less satisfied I was with just names and dates of births and deaths and maybe a marriage or two. This family had some real characters and not only that they followed patterns. Grandpa married the housekeeper, so did the other grandpa and so did dad. By the way, we aren't getting a housekeeper. There is a pattern of multiple marriages - Great-grandpa was married four times, Grandma three times, other grandpa two times, dad three times and mom twice. I myself am wife number three.
I don't want the genealogy, I want the stories to go along with the names and dates and so I begin my hunt for Red October...no that's a movie, but I bet my search could lead to at least one if not more movies of the week.
So how do I go about this hunt, this search for people I don't know? One step at a time. I'm backing up and starting over. So that when I'm done, my husband's family will have the story of their family as well as the names and dates. No more random clicking. Everything must be documented, vetted and then carefully cataloged for accuracy. Don't believe anyone. So to begin with, I need to find a record of birth for my husband that proves when and where he was born and more importantly who his parents were. Yes, he was there, but he wasn't in any condition to remember it.
Another thing, as I record pertinent records, I will make copies of them and keep everything in a lock box for safe keeping. No sense in gathering all of these records only to lose them somewhere down the line. My next step will be in keeping the records in some type of readable, or at least organized manner. Maybe a scrapbook, maybe a written manuscript. But first, I'm off to the courthouse to look for birth records with my handy dandy little camera in case I can't get the records.
