Who Has Time For That?
Once we decided to marry in 1976, my future husband and I started to plan the guest list for our wedding. I had one living grandparent, my maternal grandmother. As adults, my father had three brothers and three sisters, and my mother had two sisters and two brothers. Most of them were married and had children, and since both of my parents were the “babies” of their families, some of these cousins had children who were the ages of my sisters and me. We called these older cousins “aunt’ and “uncle,” and played with their children (actually first cousins one generation removed) as cousins.
My parents had aunts and uncles I knew growing up, and we gathered with many cousins and their families for special events. My fiance and I did not want a very large wedding, so we had to limit the guest list to our closest relatives.
His maternal grandmother was my future husband’s only living grandparent. His mother was her oldest daughter, and she had four sisters and three brothers. His father had a sister and two brothers. As we sat to write the wedding guest list, I heard about these aunts and uncles, their spouses, and their families. We took notes and sketched rudimentary family trees.
Over the years, we added to these sketches with weddings and new babies, but there were also funerals. We lost our grandmothers and older family members. We started asking my parents and mother-in-law about details, asking them to fill out paper ancestor charts and family group sheets. In 1991, our family purchased a home computer, and using a program called Brother’s Keeper, started entering the data and printing out reports to share with family members, both for corrections and to keep.
We knew family history research could be an all-consuming hobby. When my husband asked what I intended, I replied that I only wanted to capture what our parents and older relatives knew. With work, house, family, and community responsibilities, I asked, “Who has time for that?”
As it turned out, many family members were willing to help. Especially as the older generation aged, they had knowledge they were eager to share. As casinos were being built, New Englanders questioned the family story of an “Indian princess” ancestor, and wanted to check out that legacy. I traveled with a “portable computer” from work, and was able to enter information and print it out legibly at home, unlike former messy sketches. We sent, and received, a lot of old-fashioned paper mail.
I worked on my family with my parents, aunts, uncles, and my parents’ cousins, back to our immigrant ancestors in the 1880s and 1910s. My husband’s family had been in North America for far longer, with some branches going back to the 1600s. In addition to interviews with aunts, uncles, and cousins, his family history involved more traditional genealogy research in New England town halls, libraries, archives, and cemeteries, as well as research trips to Maine and New Brunswick. Once past the “somebody told me” stage, we began citing sources.
I had been right though. Eventually health concerns and other responsibilities overtook genealogical research, and we put it aside. Other family members took up the mantle for my husband’s New England, Irish, and Scottish Place/McBride/MacPeak/Dalton and Canadian and Maine Porter/London/Dickinson families.
When I returned to family history in 2015, my focus had changed. The internet made so much information easier to find, including records from abroad. I wanted to more widely share documents and stories, so I started blogging. I began exploring DNA and DNA matches, mostly of my Polish relatives. I became good at tracing others’ immigrant ancestors across the pond, often to common locations with my own ancestors. Of course, I had to look at the heritage of my grandchildren–in Germany, Sweden, English and French Canada.
There is much to explore, so I have to choose my focus. I have been concentrating on my Polish ancestors and relatives. I am leaving it to my daughter and others to explore their early American colonists and Revolutionary War, Loyalist, and Irish and Scottish immigrant ancestors. While I would like to research everyone, “Who has time for that?”
My Family History Research 