Famous - or Notorious?

If you have ever searched for yourself on the web, you may not actually find anything (not even about the prize pig you entered in the Lauderdale County Fair last year). Maybe you can find your name listed with participants in the recent Turkey Trot - but, unless you won the race there probably wasn't an interview published in the paper ("Yes, I am the greatest - but I owe it all to genetics!"). Joking aside, did you notice what DOES appear on the web? It is usually the most famous or infamous person with your name (AKA "the squeaky wheel", the "black sheep" or "show-off"). It has been that way for years, too. We obviously know about Julius Caesar because he was a great showman and soldier - but we probably couldn't find the name of his next door neighbor.

What does any of this have to with genealogy? Well, it is a basic fact of human nature that most people live their lives in relative obscurity. Unless their existence intersected with a census or mass immigration, you may be disappointed to learn that the only "proof" of their existence is a barely-legible name on a vital record or (if you are REALLY lucky) fading words on a tombstone.

Of course, you could have had famous or notorious ancestors - you should hope you did, actually! Count your blessings if you know that Aunt Martha ran a brothel on Bourbon Street (shocking!): you'll probably find more than you ever dreamed about her - stories about how she smuggled bootleg liquor during Prohibition or was arrested for lewd behavior (but then released on the word of the Mayor). Aunt Martha became "famous" (at least for genealogy purposes) because she was interesting. Even today, do the newspapers care about the 95% of us who get up in the morning and work all day, settling into our Lazy-Boys at night? Of course not.

One thing that does happen, luckily, is that the relatives of notorious people are sometimes listed in scandalous stories or obituaries (much to their horror, I'm sure). Maybe you'll even get a break and find that someone in your family was an eyewitness to an important event. Perhaps when Billy the Kid was killed some of your folks came out of the woodwork to report "they knew him back when." With all of the published articles in the last 300 years, you are bound to find information about your family in the margins of history. And then you can tell the rest of your family about how Aunt Martha's ill-gotten gains actually paid for the family home on Canal Street... Happy hunting!