Who Do I Think I Am?

There is a show on television that airs on a particular channel every once in awhile called Who Do You Think You Are? The basis of the show is that of celebrities seeking their genealogical roots (with a lot of help), and making some conclusion about themselves based on what they find.  The quest takes them to several locations all around this US and overseas.  When it's on, I don't watch all of the episodes, largely because I don't know or have any interest in the celebrities being featured, but once in awhile I will take a particular interest in one.  Last week, I saw one that featured Kelsey Grammer (of Frasier fame) that I found interesting.  A couple of others have caught my attention, as well.

I think the show is highly scripted because, as I have found in my own genealogical escapades, it just "don't" happen as easily as the show makes it appear...and in every case, someone else has done the archival legwork.  Ha!  I could do that, too, if I wanted to pay a genealogist to TRY to find information that might not even exist, but if nothing were found in the case of the show, there would be no episode to watch.  The network would have to abort that episode.

Here is the pattern for the show:

1.  A celebrity meets with a parent or other family member who shows him/her one or more pictures of a particular ancestor with some family lore about that ancestor, which starts the quest of finding information.

2.  The celebrity starts out in an historical society or county seat somewhere near the origins of the ancestor in question and sits down with an historian or genealogist in front of a laptop computer, searching on Ancestry.com for clues as a jumping off place for the quest for information.

3.  The celebrity travels from place to place throughout the country and overseas, based on clues obtained from the last place, to talk to other historians/archivists about the ancestor.

4.  The genealogist at each location presents books or documents--and sometimes hand-written letters, etc.--that give a little more information about the ancestor and his/her life.

5.  The celebrity ends up, alone, in a cemetery or a field or a highway where the ancestor once lived or traveled, musing about what life must have been like for the ancestor and his/her motivation for doing what he/she did in life.

6.  Sometimes, the celebrity ends up back at home with the parent or other family members from the beginning of the show in order to report what was found in the search.

Easy, right?  Not so much!  I've already mentioned that archivists don't do genealogy research for free.  (If they did, they would be swamped with requests to look up Great-Great-Grandpa Harley or someone else of minor import in the grand scheme of things.)  Here are some of the other pitfalls of doing genealogy searches--and I'm only hitting on a few of them:

1.  Name duplications.  Do you have a clue how many Davids and Johns and Josephs there are/were in the world, or how many generations name their children after family members?   Combine that with a common sir name, and you already have a research problem on the very first level.  Is this Joseph Armstrong from a couple centuries ago my grandfather, my uncle, or my cousin?  It takes quite a bit more research to figure out!  (I love it when ancestors name their children something less common.  My daughter has a relative whose first name was Greenberry!)

2.  Mistakes.  Mistakes?  Surely census records and other documents don't have mistakes.  Say it ain't so!  Sadly, it is--everything from misspelled names to inaccuracies that are reported to the census taker as truth.  I have a relative that was listed on a census as a child of my grandmother's who was, in reality, one of her grandchildren.  I have another relative whose tombstone shows her to be Mary Ellen Corron, when in fact, her last name was Curn.  It was changed at the whim of the daughter who bought the stone.  (Long story.)  Then there are the Bryans of Kentucky...also spelled Bryant and who knows how many other ways?!  The family Bible shows one of my relatives as "Amanda Elizabeth" when all of the other records show her as "Elizabeth Amanda."  Can't even believe the Bible on this one!  Dates can be wrong.  Names can be wrong.  Even places of birth can be wrong.  And so it goes...

3.  Dead ends.  There are a lot of details of the lives of the ancestors featured on the TV show that were simply assumed or filled in by the archivists.  They are probably very good, educated guesses, but no documentation can or will ever be found to prove them.  It is frustrating, at best--especially so for someone who is as curious as I and wants to recreate some events in order to understand what made some of my ancestors tick.  My grandmother, for instance, was born out of wedlock at the Carroll County Poor House, near Savannah, Illinois.  This was a secret that she took to her grave.  It was decades after her death before I/we found out the truth.  What she told her children--which was either what she was told and believed or something she fabricated in order to hide her humble beginnings--was that her father was killed in an accident when she was two years old.  His name was rumored to be Peter Morgan or John Peter Morgan, but my great-grandmother entered the Poor House under her maiden name in order to have her baby, and my grandmother's birth was recorded there also under her mother's maiden name.  Was there really a John Peter Morgan?   We'll never know.  I don't know how they came to be in Carroll County or how long they were there before moving on to Wisconsin.  We have no place to start in trying to find Mr. Morgan, and no way of knowing if any Mr. Morgan we should find was actually my great-grandfather, since he had nothing to do with the family.  Dead end.

4.  Broken, unreadable, or missing tombstones.  Old cemeteries--particularly those that are small and in the back of a property rather than in a dedicated spot--can get overgrown.  Old tombstones get lost in the foliage of the place, or get broken and removed from the grave to a safer spot up against a tree somewhere else in the cemetery, or erode to become unreadable.  Or sometimes, the family that buried its loved one couldn't afford a proper marker for the grave.  A year or so ago, my daughter and I spent the better part of an afternoon traipsing through cemeteries in a couple of tiny little Illinois towns looking for the graves of my father's parents (not buried together).  We had documents to show that they were buried there, but after hours of searching, could find nothing.  (Later, a genealogist offered to send a lady who knows the cemeteries well to look again for us.  She confirmed that there were no grave markers for them.  I wish I were a rich person and could afford to buy tombstones for them!)  My daughter has a direct-line ancestor who fought and died of disease at Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War.  No one seems to know where those men are buried.  Likewise, I had an uncle in the generation preceeding my grandmother's who died at the Jacksonville State Hospital (for the insane) in Illinois.  His unmarked grave is somewhere over there in a grassy area where many are buried.

I get lost in all of this because I find it so fascinating, but also frustrating.  I have no clue how people succeeded in doing genealogical research before the days of the Internet!  In all of my searches, most of which have been greatly enhanced by my daughter's efforts and knowledge, I've had three moments of reverence and revelation.  The first came when I found the Rocky Spring Presbyterian Church near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where some of my Armstrong ancestors joined the Revolutionary War effort.  And there, in the churchyard cemetery, was the grave of Joseph Armstrong whom I thought was a grandfather of mine.  It was a beautiful day.  I stood at the foot of the slab that marked his resting place and talked to him.  I told him that I hoped he would be proud of the family that became his descendants, had he ever known us.  It was an emotional couple of minutes for me, like standing in the face of greatness.

The second moment came after my daughter scanned a very, very faded old family picture on her computer.  I'd had the picture for decades and had seen what was common in those days--my great-great-grandfather sitting in a chair in front of a house, with my grandmother as a child standing next to him. What I hadn't seen before because of the faded nature of the picture was a detail that only showed up with the computer enhancement: at a side door by the back of the house stood a woman on crutches (my disabled great-grandmother) and a tall, bearded man (her husband??) with a basket of laundry at the clothes line.  Wow!  What a moment of discovery!  My great-grandmother had been in that picture all along, looking toward the camera--at me!  I was awestruck.  Can't explain it.

The third moment came with the discovery of my grandmother's humble birth.  That happened almost by accident.  My grandmother had told me, years before she died in 1975, that her birth records had been lost in a fire when the Carroll County Courthouse (Illinois) had burned down.  I never inquired about why she was in Carroll County since her family was from Tazewell County, and she had later been raised in Wisconsin, but "Carroll County" stuck in my mind.  Just a few years ago, with the advent of the Internet, I looked up the Carroll County Courthouse.  And there it was in all it's red-brick splendor.  It dated back to 1859 and had never burned.  (My grandmother was born in 1890.)  I reported this to my daughter on Instant Messenger, and what seemed like only a few minutes later, Megan had found the records of the Almshouse (Poor House), with my grandmother's birth recorded. Her mother had been admitted, "crippled and in the family way".  I was struck dumb.  A great family mystery was solved.  It was there all along.  We just had to find it.  My grandmother was orphaned by age 12.  I'm quite certain that she worked hard all her life to hide the circumstances of her birth, fearing that people would think less of her.  She was a proud woman...but knowing the truth only made me love and admire her more for all of the obstacles she had overcome in life.

I would love to have a situation like that TV show in which archivists are doing the legwork for me.  I have so many questions about some of my ancestors, most of which will probably never get answered--but it's so much fun to try!  Unfortunately, since I'm not a celebrity, people wouldn't watch a show about my family, no matter how fascinating I think it is.  So much for that!!

Who do I think I am?  I'm still trying to find out!