I started climbing the family
tree almost thirty years ago. When my
older son was a toddler, I decided I wanted him to know who and where he came
from. So my passion (obsession) for
genealogy started then. It started in
the days before Ancestry, FamilySearch, heck I didn’t even have the internet
then! I had to do it the hard way. I mailed lots of letters and self-addressed, stamped
envelopes. When we had the time and
extra money, we made trips to the counties ancestors lived in and spent a day
at the courthouse looking for marriage licenses, probate cases and land records
and wandering through cemeteries. My
husband Scott has never been really interested but he is a great helper. He’s the official driver, is able to find everything and
is an excellent cemetery explorer. Good
times!
I spent countless hours at the local library scanning
microfilm. I borrowed microfilm of
newspapers on interlibrary loan to get obituaries for ancestors. Our genealogical society has a nice collection
of books on other areas as well and I spent time digging through those for
information as well. I have made some of
my most important finds at the Frank Carlson Library. I also had some of the strangest things occur
there.
One day I was looking through the books for other
states, trying to find information on some long distant ancestor. A book fell off the shelf and hit me, falling
open to a certain page. I looked at that
page and it was about the person I was looking for! It was like he wanted to be found and had to
let me know I wasn’t looking in the right place.
Another day I was whizzing through microfilm, looking
for a certain date. I wanted to see if
there was an article on the Fiftieth Anniversary celebration for Marcel &
Julia (Talbot) Balthazor (see week 4).
Their marriage license reported their wedding date as October 28th. So I was heading for mid-October to start the
hunt. I sped through and stopped the
film to see where I was and how far I needed to go and there, right in the
middle of the screen, was a fuzzy newspaper photo of Marcel and Julia! The important thing to note here is that I
probably would not have found it any other way.
I was looking for a late October celebration. They celebrated their anniversary in late
September! This article was two weeks
before where I was going to start looking.
(The photo of Marcel and Julia Balthazor that I stumbled onto)
One of the librarians likes to tell a story about
me. She was working the day I was there
trying to prove a family legend and find the death of my great-great
grandfather, Noah Frank Hedrick. The
family story said it was a cold, wet spring and he was out working the
fields. He caught pneumonia and
died. We had no date other than
1908. I borrowed the Linn Creek, Missouri
newspaper on interlibrary loan and started reading the paper in January. I found mentions of the family in the Honey
Run column. In that column, the writer
talked of the cold, wet weather. And
then I found a mention that Frank Hedrick was ill. I couldn’t control my enthusiasm and the
stillness of the library was broken by my excited “Oh boy! My grandpa is sick!” The next week, the column talked of more
weather woes and mentioned that Frank Hedrick was no better. She said I was bouncing in the chair by this
point, making delighted little “tee hee hee” noises. Then in the May 22, 1908 issue of the Linn
Creek Reveille, I found the notice of his death. My friend said this find was accompanied by a
satisfied “YES!” Other, more experienced family historians had looked for his date of death and not found it and I had it! I was still a novice and this was a major event for me.
When I would have a bad day at work, I’d head to the library
afterward and just read some of the old newspapers on microfilm. It was always therapy to just sit and read
about what life was like way back when, when life was simple.
It is so convenient to be able to pull up
Newspapers.com and read newspapers at home and to be able to search by name
instead of having to read every issue looking for tidbits. It is wonderful to be able to pull up actual
records on Ancestry and FamilySearch.
But nothing beats a good day at the library.
I could not agree more.
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