Connecting the Dots...

When you've finished the traditional family tree (with little circles for each person, vital facts enclosed), you may be proud of your progress - and may even impress other friends and relatives with your pedigree. Still, I hope you won't ignore the nagging feeling that people's lives are more than the sum of their life milestones. You may even have begun to wonder if your own life would mean anything if it was portrayed simply as a branch on the proverbial family tree.

While birth dates, death dates and marriage dates are all important elements of your project, you should try to expand your search beyond those simple data points. If you make only vital statistics the focus of all of your research, you may miss out on an essential component of the process: truly getting to "know" your relatives. Beyond being born and getting married, they also got in trouble with their parents, failed classes in school, won the blue ribbon for watercolor painting at the county fair, got a speeding ticket, won election to the City Council. For many life events, someone else in the family (or, if you are lucky, a reporter!) was an eye-witness. Your job, as a conscientious family history researcher, is to find records of these life lessons.

Admittedly, the news isn't always good. As we've discussed in Famous - or Notorious?, you may find that one of your relative's lives is very well documented for reasons that might make some people cringe. But other people lived quietly in the shadows - and their stories will be much more difficult to discover. You should start with the things that are found in the Attic or Basement: old Bibles, photo books, keep-sakes, programmes from graduation ceremonies. After that, you can expand your search into the public record arena (tax records, directories, military service records, etc.).

Online genealogy provides a unique opportunity for you to conduct your research when most libraries and archives are closed. This allows you to add "flesh" to the "skeleton" of your family history when you actually have the time to browse records without feeling the pressure of other family members (who want to leave the records office)! If you check out the links at Virtual Genealogy, you should be able to make some significant progress in building a framework for your overall project.

But don't forget: There are also facts and anecdotes in the minds of our older relatives, as we discussed in Conducting an Interview. Never undervalue the memory of people who lived before television and the Internet "melted our brains." You should try to learn all you can from them about everyone in the family they can remember - even if you don't know the BDMs. You can always (later) visit the Web to see what they have on dear old Uncle Frank...

The lesson here is that you should always develop a life-story for individuals - not just collect names and dates. Your own life will eventually be summed up in an obituary, written (hopefully) by someone who knew you well. Try to create a biographical sketch for the members of your family you research. Happy hunting!