Genealogy Research – Why I do what I do – Part 1 – My wife’s family

Having posted a lot of blog entries about genealogy, I thought I would step back and recount why it is that I do what I do. The first part of my story has to do with my wife’s family.

In 2006, following the death of my wife’s father, her brothers were trying to use some of the money from his IRA to fix up the house that my mother-in-law was still living in. As part of that process, they collected a lot of boxes and semi-organized them. One of her “collections” was a bunch of genealogy material.

My mother-in-law was the family “historian” and had taken it upon herself to be the one to preserve the family history. However, she was not a terribly organized person. Thus, her genealogy collection consisted of several boxes (I recall there being perhaps 7-8 large ones) with anything related to genealogy. She did not believe in using new or full sheets of paper, so she used the backs of envelopes and other scraps to record information. She also saved anything remotely related to this area (wedding/birth announcements, obituary notices, etc.) Finally, if anyone wrote a letter to her (she corresponded with a large number of relatives) that had anything of a genealogy nature (e.g. “my daughter Judy celebrated her 16^th birthday yesterday”, or “my son named his new grandson John Michael after his two grandfathers”), she would circle the information, mark the envelope as “genealogy” and save the entire letter and envelope.

As part of my contribution to helping my mother-in-law get her life sorted out, I went through all those boxes of material, collected all the “facts” from each scrap or envelope, and put it all into a growing document in my computer. When I was done, I had a long document (electronically), and a single box of historical items of interest (obituary notices, etc.). I then set about to organize all the “facts” into a coherent list.

As I built up a family descendant tree, I would put the relevant facts into it and then erase the disconnected fact from the long list. Eventually I had complete lists of individuals, their birth/marriage/death dates, all organized by families (from great-grandparents, to grandparents, to parents, to children). I also had a remaining list of non-connected facts to resolve.

I would then correspond with my mother-in-law, asking things like “Who is Judy Lusk?” or trying to verify how so-and-so was related to so-and-so. For some of those I would get back helpful information, other times I would find that Johnny in the graduation announcement was not a relative at all, but someone for whom she was providing childcare.

As a way of tying it all together, I also purchased my initial membership in ancestry.com and was able to follow the family tree back more generations than she had. Finally, I began corresponding with a couple of other relatives who also had a genealogy interest in the family and we shared information and helped each other out.

My mother-in-law passed away in 2010. I have not done a lot of additional research into that side of the family since then as I have no one else who is truly interested in it.