I started to do genealogy work before I was interested in family history. If you stop to think about it; you did too.
HEIRLOOMS
My path to genealogy began when my mother’s parents passed away. I was about 13 years old. I remember that my mother went to clean out their house and came home with heaps of stuff; chairs, window seats, records, medical books, etc. My brother and I were supposed to choose some things. I picked out my grandfather’s magnifying glass as I remembered him using it when working on his stamp collection and my grandmother’s red ruby necklace that I had seen her wearing in a picture.
A couple of years later, my mother made copies of some of the family photos she brought home as a gift to each of her brothers. I made a ‘safety copy’ of them with my brand-new Sony Mavica digital camera. I still have those 3.5 diskettes, which served as film for those cameras, with the copies of the photos of my uncles, grandparents when they were young adults, their parents and grandparents.
INTERVIEWS
When my paternal grandparents got old, and my grandmother got ill, I talked to my grandfather about his life and recorded the interviews. I remembered he had siblings but knew nothing about them. We pulled out the old photos and he showed me pictures of Fannie Mae and Mary. He told me about growing up in a mill town and what he knew of the family. But the nicest thing about interviewing him turns out not to be the family history but rather hearing his voice again when I play the tape.
Months later, he finally let me write the names of the people in the photos on the back (he thought doing so would ruin the photos). Very few people from this neighborhood have positively ID’d photos from the 20s and 30s and I still send out copies of these photos to family members that I meet in Facebook groups.
RECORDS
My paternal grandfather wanted to know more about his grandparents Charles and Sarah Pearce. I started a search in the local historical societies and found a Charles Pearce listed in the 1880 US Census with my great grandfather, Thomas Levi, and my grandfather’s aunts and uncles. Yet Charles wasn’t married to a Sarah but rather a woman named Mary. We wondered Mary had died and Charles remarried. Since then, we figured out that Sarah was a nickname.
Charles himself was a stonecutter. Living in Ellicott Mills (now, Oella), this likely meant that he was employed by the local quarry. Granddad wanted to know if it were called the Slate Rock and Gravel Company. Ha, ha, ha. Good one, Granddad.
RESEARCH
I took a side trip during a vacation in 1997 to help out some researchers from my Mom’s family. I went to Hofgeismar, Germany with a friend to find records about Georg Briede, a Hessian soldier who deserted and became a farmer in Frederick, Maryland. It was fruitful, the pastor and assistant were extremely helpful and we found several records for Georg and family and got a local tour! The extended family used this information to write the definitive Briede genealogy article for a historical society publication.
I <3 PACK RATS
When I returned to my parents house, I started looking through old family letters and photos with my cousin and we found a treasure trove; a picture of my 2G Grandmother and a Civil War letter, a Daguerreotype, a letter in German from 1840 and old ledgers and medical kits; a genealogical feast! How could I leave this stuffed in packed in boxes? At this point, I caught the genealogy bug and I am not cured yet.