Genealogy Research – Why I do what I do – Part 2 – My father’s family

Having gotten my feet wet in genealogy research with my wife’s family, I also began to research my father’s family. I had little written information to go on, so began with what I know of them personally, put that into ancestry.com and followed the various hints that it gave me.

I had some skeletal information and the basic outline of a family tree. The limit of my research going back was only into the mid-1800s as I had hit “the 1850 wall” before which the details collected in census records were quite limited. I was also limited because the newest census records then available were from 1930, so it was difficult to locate living individuals (by law the census records are not made public until 72 years after they are collected).

In 2012, the 1940 census records were made available and I began going through them as they were digitized over a several month period. Then that summer my mother abruptly passed on from a heart attack at the age of 88. Besides the personal impact, I came to the conclusion that I was then the oldest living “Russell” in our family tree as far as I had been able to determine, all the other family lines from my great-grandfather on down either ending, having only females so the last name was no longer Russell when they married, or the oldest person in the line was younger than myself. I was truly feeling burdened by that knowledge.

But only a month later I received a message via my ancestry.com subscription from someone else with the last name of Russell that said, “It appears that we have a common ancestor….” As it turned out, he was correct. But the common ancestor was back one more generation than I had thus far researched (to my great-great-grandfather). And it turned out that my cousin George was older than I was, so I was no longer the oldest living Russell.

This invigorated my research as I had someone to share it with. Together we embarked on a shared journey. As I delved deeper into building a descendant tree, I discovered other living relatives as well. I went back not only to all the descendants of my great-great-grandfather, but my great*3-grandfather as well.

I also redoubled my efforts at breaking through the “1850 wall” and was finally able to do so. In a series of steps (which I have earlier blogged about), I was able to trace the family name back to its origin about 1000 years ago and then beyond.

In the process, I have not only learned a lot about my heritage, but I have made many new friends in the various Russell relatives I never knew I had. Most recently I was able to construct the family line for another Russell family who had grown up in the same town as I had, but whom my father had always said were not really related. I found that in fact we were related and had a delightful phone conversation with the 80-year old matriarch of that family about our shared ancestry. That’s when genealogy becomes real!